diff --git a/_index.db b/_index.db index cb5a63731..49c870a25 100644 Binary files a/_index.db and b/_index.db differ diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3bb17b023 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +--- +title: "A History of Knowledge" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Knowledge" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:29:00.274251+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A History of Knowledge is a 1991 book on intellectual history, with emphasis on the western civilization, written by Charles Van Doren, a former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It is a history of human thought covering over 5,000 years of philosophy, learning, and belief systems that surveys the key historical trends and breakthroughs connecting the globalizing human landscape of the 20th century all the way back to the scattered roots of human civilization in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece, and Rome. +For a sense of the tone, the first section is entitled "The Wisdom of the Ancients" and begins, "By the time written history began, some fifty centuries ago, mankind had learned much more than our primitive ancestors knew." +The book's last chapter focuses on the potential developments of the 21st century. It also contains biographies of many notable historical figures. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a3efe6c6b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +title: "Abbot Payson Usher Prize" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:06.152222+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Abbot Payson Usher Memorial Prize, established in 1961 and named for Dr Abbott Payson Usher, is an award given annually by Society for the History of Technology for the best scholarly work on the history of technology published during the preceding three years under the auspices of the Society. +Recipients include some of the most highly regarded historians of technology, including such pioneering figures as Robert S. Woodbury, Silvio Bedini, Robert Multhauf, Eugene S. Ferguson, Cyril Stanley Smith and others. The prize also indicates shifts in the field's emphasis over more than five decades from early technical studies of individual machines; the subsequent prominence of science, systems, and industrial research in the work of Thomas P. Hughes, George Wise, Bruce Seely and others; the rise of politics, gender and colonialism; and the recent shift to cultural histories of technology by Edward Jones-Imhotep and others. Pamela O. Long's Usher-prize-winning "Openness of Knowledge" was one basis for her awards as Guggenheim Fellow and MacArthur Fellow. + +== Past recipients == +Source: Abbot Payson Usher Memorial Prize \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f9124ca38 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +title: "Abbot Payson Usher Prize" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:06.152222+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +2024: Faisal Husain, “To Dam or Not to Dam: The Social Construction of an Ottoman Hydraulic Project, 1701-1702,” Technology and Culture 64:2 (2023): 456–484. 2023: Leor Halevi, "What Hath Allah Wrought? The Global Invention of Prescriptive Machines for the Islamic Consumer, 1975–2010", Technology and Culture 62:3 (2021): 741–779 +2022: Robert MacDougall, "Sympathetic Physics: The Keely Motor and The Laws of Thermodynamics in Nineteenth Century Culture", Technology and Culture 60:2 (2019): 438–46 +2021: Robyn d’Avignon, "Spirited Geobodies: Producing Subterranean Property in Nineteenth-Century Bambuk, West Africa", Technology and Culture 61:2 Supplement (2020), S20-S48 +2020: Daniel Williford, "Seismic Politics: Risk and Reconstruction after the 1960 Earthquake in Agadir, Morocco", Technology and Culture 58:4 (October 2017): 982–1016 +2019: Eden Medina, "Forensic Identification in the Aftermath of Human Rights Crimes in Chile: A Decentered Computer History", Technology and Culture 59:4 (Supplement, 2018): S100–S133 +2018: Whitney Laemmli, "A Case in Pointe: Romance and Regimentation at the New York City Ballet", Technology and Culture 56 (January 2015): 1–27 +2017: Edward Jones-Imhotep, "Malleability and Machines: Glenn Gould and the Technological Self", Technology and Culture 57 (April 2016): 287–321 +2016: Edward J. Gillin, "Prophets of Progress: authority in the scientific projections and religious realisations of the Great Eastern steamship", Technology and Culture 56 (October 2015): 928–956 +2015: Jung Lee, "Invention without Science: 'Korean Edisons' and the Changing Understanding of Technology in Colonial Korea", Technology and Culture 54 (October 2013): 782–814 +2014: Chris Evans and Alun Withey, "An Enlightenment in Steel? Innovation in the Steel Trades of Eighteenth-Century Britain", Technology and Culture 53 (July 2012): 533–560 +2013: Thomas S. Mullaney, "The Moveable Typewriter: How Chinese Typists Developed Predictive Text during the Height of Maoism", Technology and Culture 53 (October 2012): 777-814 +2012: Tiina Männistö-Funk, "The Crossroads of Technology and Tradition: Vernacular Bicycles in Rural Finland, 1880-1910", Technology and Culture 52 (October 2011): 733–756 +2011: David Biggs, "Breaking from the Colonial Mold: Water Engineering and the Failure of Nation-Building in the Plain of Reeds, Vietnam", Technology and Culture 49 (July 2008): 599–623 +2010: Peter Norton, "Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age", Technology and Culture 48 (April 2007): 331–359 +2009: Crosbie Smith and Anne Scott, "'Trust in Providence': Building Confidence into the Cunard Line of Steamers", Technology and Culture 48 (July 2007): 471–96 +2008: Eric Schatzberg, "Technik Comes to America: Changing Meanings of Technology before 1930", Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 486-512 JSTOR 40061169 +2007: Carlo Belfanti, "Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age", Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 569–89 +2006: Lissa Roberts, "An Arcadian Apparatus: The Introduction of the Steam Engine into the Dutch Landscape", Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 251–76 +2005: William Storey, "Guns, Race, and Skill in Nineteenth-Century South Africa", Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 687–711 +2004: Kenneth Lipartito, "Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure", Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 50–81 +2003: Amy Slaton, "'As Near as Practicable': Precision, Ambiguity, and the Social Features of Industrial Quality Control", Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 51–80 +2002: Wiebe E. Bijker and Karin Bijsterveld, "Walking through Plans: Technology, Democracy and Gender Identity", Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 485–515 +2001: John K. Brown, "Design Plans, Working Drawings, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775-1945", Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 195–238 +2000: Matthew W. Roth, "Mulholland Highway and the Engineering Culture of Los Angeles in the 1920s", Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 545–575 +1999: Joy Parr, "What Makes Washday Less Blue? Gender, Choice, Nation, and Technology Choice in Postwar Canada", Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 153–186 +1998: David Mindell, "'The Clangor of That Blacksmith's Fray': Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor", Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 242-70 JSTOR 3106372 +1997: Eric Schatzberg, "Ideology and Technical Choice: The Decline of the Wooden Airplane in the United States, 1920-1945", Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 34-69 JSTOR 3106748 +1996: Gabrielle Hecht, "Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar France", Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 657-85 JSTOR 3106502 +1995: Jameson W. Doig and David P. Billington, "Ammann's First Bridge: A Study in Engineering, Politics, and Entrepreneurial Behavior", Technology and Culture 35 (1994): 537-70 JSTOR 3106258 +1994: John Law, "The Olympus 320 Engine: A Case Study in Design, Development, and Organizational Control", Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 409-40 JSTOR 3106632 +1993: Barton Hacker, "An Annotated Index to Volumes 1-25", Technology and Culture (1991) JSTOR i356102; and Pamela O. Long, "The Openness of Knowledge: An Ideal and Its Context in 16th-Century Writings on Mining and Metallurgy", Technology and Culture 32 (1991): 318-55 JSTOR 3105713 +1992: Bryan Pfaffenberger, "The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes", Technology and Culture 31 (1990): 361-97 JSTOR 3106052 +1991: Robert Gordon, "Who Turned the Mechanical Ideal into Mechanical Reality?" Technology and Culture 29 (1988): 744-78 JSTOR 3105044 +1990: Laurence F. Gross, "Wool Carding: A Study of Skills and Technology", Technology and Culture 28 (1987): 804-27 JSTOR 3105183 +1989: Larry Owens, "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer", Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 63-95 JSTOR 3104945 +1988: Judith A. McGaw, "Accounting for Innovation: Technological Change and Business Practice in the Berkshire County Paper Industry", Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 703-25 JSTOR 3105616 +1987: Bruce E. Seely, "The Scientific Mystique in Engineering: Highway Research at the Bureau of Public Roads, 1918-1940", Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 798-831 JSTOR 3104623 +1986: Donald MacKenzie, "Marx and the Machine", Technology and Culture 25 (1984): 473-502 JSTOR 3104202 +1985: Eda Fowlks Kranakis, "The French Connection: Giffard's Injector and the Nature of Heat", Technology and Culture 23 (1982): 3-38 JSTOR 3104441 +1984: Walter G. Vincenti, "Control-Volume Analysis: A Difference in Thinking between Engineering and Physics", Technology and Culture 23 (1982): 145-74 JSTOR 3104129 +1983: George Wise, "A New Role for Professional Scientists in Industry: Industrial Research at General Electric, 1900-1916", Technology and Culture (1980): 408-29 JSTOR 3103155 +1982: Harold Dorn, "Hugh Lincoln Cooper and the First Détente", Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 322-47 JSTOR 3103869 +1981: Thomas P. Hughes, "The Electrification of America: The System Builders", Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 124-61 JSTOR 3103115 +1974: Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey for their bibliography of the philosophy of technology, first published as a supplement to Technology and Culture 14 (1973) and then separately by the University of Chicago Press. 1974: R. L. Hills and A. J. Pacey "The Measurement of Power in Early Steam-Driven Textile Mills", Technology and Culture 13 (1972): 25–43 JSTOR 3102654 +1972: Cyril Stanley Smith, "Art, Technology and Science: Notes on their Historical Interaction", Technology and Culture 11 (1970): 493-549 JSTOR 3102690 +1969: Eugene S. Ferguson, "Bibliography of the History of Technology", an expansion of a series of articles originally published in Technology and Culture (1962–1965) and constituting no. 5 in the Monograph Series of the History of Technology, published jointly by SHOT and MIT Press +1968: Carl W. Condit, "The First Reinforced-Concrete Skyscraper: The Ingalls Building in Cincinnati and Its Place in Structural History", Technology and Culture 9 (1968): 1-33 JSTOR 3102041 +1965: Robert P. Multhauf, "Sal Ammoniac: A Case History in Industrialization", Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 569-86 JSTOR 3101750 +1962: Silvio A. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..591174d9d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Abbot Payson Usher Prize" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbot_Payson_Usher_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:06.152222+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Bedini, "The Compartmented Cylindrical Clepsydra", Technology and Culture 3 (1962): 115-41 JSTOR 3101437 +1961: Robert S. Woodbury, "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts", Technology and Culture 1 (1960): 235-53 JSTOR 3101392 + +== See also == +List of history awards + +== References == + +== External links == +The Abbot Payson Usher Prize - List of Winners \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Pais_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Pais_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5b3c70115 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Pais_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Abraham Pais Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Pais_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:17.872310+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics is an award given each year since 2005 jointly by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics for "outstanding scholarly achievements in the history of physics". The prize is named after Abraham Pais (1918–2000), science historian and particle physicist; as of 2024 the recipient receives US$10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions of the recipient, plus an allowance for travel to an APS meeting to receive the award and deliver a lecture on the history of physics. + + +== Recipients == +Source: + + +== See also == +List of American Physical Society prizes and awards +List of physics awards + + +== External links == +Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, American Physical Society + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Family_Tree-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Family_Tree-0.md index afeabac74..5c1183a92 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Family_Tree-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Family_Tree-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Family_Tree" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:43.864333+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:34.722825+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9fe9d3692 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Aerodynamics Research Institute" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerodynamics_Research_Institute" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:31.459964+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA) in Göttingen was one of the four predecessor organizations of the 1969 founded "German Research and Experimental Institute for Aerospace", which in 1997 was renamed German Aerospace Center (DLR). + + +== History == + +The AVA was created in 1919 from the 1907 Göttingen by Ludwig Prandtl founded "Modellversuchsanstalt für Aerodynamik der Motorluftschiff-Studiengesellschaft". In its founding years, it was still concerned with the development of the "best" form of airship. In 1908, the first wind tunnel was built in Göttingen for tests on models for aviation. In 1915, founded in 1911 Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) and under the direction of Ludwig Prandtl the "Modellversuchsanstalt aerodynamics" was founded in 1919 as the "Aerodynamic Research Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society" (AVA) was transferred to the KWG and converted in 1925 into the "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research linked to the Aerodynamic Research Institute". +Ludwig Prandtl headed the institute until 1937, his successor became Albert Betz. In the same year a spin-off from the institute took place under the name "Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt Göttingen e. V. in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society ", in which the Reich Ministry of Aviation was involved. +The remaining after the spin-off part was continued under the name "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Flow Research" from the 1948, the Max Planck Institute for Fluid Research (today Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization). +The AVA was confiscated in 1945 by the British (until 1948), 1953 as "Aerodynamic Research Institute Göttingen e. V. re-opened in the Max Planck Society and fully integrated in 1956 as the "Aerodynamic Research Institute in the Max Planck Society". +In 1969, the spin-off from the Max Planck Society and the founding of the "German Research and Experimental Institute for Aerospace e. V.". + + +== Bibliography == +Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt Göttingen e.V. in der Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (CPTS), in: Eckart Henning, Marion Kazemi: Handbuch zur Institutsgeschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-/ Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften 1911–2011 – Daten und Quellen, Berlin 2016, 2 subvolumes, volume 1: Institute und Forschungsstellen A–L (online, PDF, 75 MB), pages 27–45 (Chronologie des Instituts) + + +== Sources == +Historie des DLR – Gesellschaft von Freunden des DLR e. V. +100 Jahre DLR – Homepage des DLR +Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_Archives-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_Archives-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b0af08418 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_Archives-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Albert Einstein Archives" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein_Archives" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:44.281773+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Albert Einstein Archives refers to an archive on the Givat Ram (Edmond J. Safra) campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem housing the personal papers of 20th century physicist Albert Einstein. + + +== Overview == + +In his will, Albert Einstein left the Hebrew University his personal papers and the copyright to them. The Albert Einstein Archives contain some 55,000 items. In March 2012, the university announced that it had digitized the archive and was planning to make it more accessible online. The archive initially released 2,000 documents. Within the collection are his personal notes, love letters to various women, including the woman who would become his second wife, Elsa. Also to be included in the online collection is a letter to the Arabic newspaper Falastin, proposing a "Secret Council" composed of Arabs and Jews to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict. + + +== History == + +Albert Einstein visited Palestine in 1923 for 12 days, giving the first lecture at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—two years before the university opened in 1925. Menachem Ussishkin, the president of the Zionist Executive, invited Einstein to settle in Jerusalem, but this was the only visit that Einstein actually made to Jerusalem. However, Einstein was a member of the university's first board of governors. In 1925, the original 46-page manuscript of the general theory of relativity ended up at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. +Einstein did not save all of his written material, but from 1919, as his fame increased, he employed his stepdaughter Ilse as a secretarial assistant. Helen Dukas (1896–1982) began working for Einstein with increased systematization from April 1928, although not all outgoing correspondence was saved. After the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, Einstein's son-in-law Rudolf Kayser, aided by the French Embassy, rescued Einstein's papers in Berlin. Some of the material at Einstein's summer house in Caputh, Brandenburg was destroyed to avoid seizure, although most of his works between 1930 and 1932 were saved. That material was transported via Haberlandstrasse where Einstein lived in Berlin, then to Paris, and ended up stored in Princeton, New Jersey, United States until after Einstein's death. +Einstein's 1950 will appointed Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan as trustees of the estate and stated, "[A]ll literary rights and assets shall be vested in the Hebrew University." After Einstein's death in 1955, the trustees spent many years organizing Einstein's papers. In the 1960s, Helen Dukas and the physicist Gerald Holton of Harvard University in the USA reorganized the archive, with the aim of publishing the material, in a joint project between the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Princeton University Press. The material increased from 14,000 documents at the time of Einstein's death in 1955 to around 42,000 documents in 1982. To aid in this work, Einstein's papers were transferred from his Princeton home to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. +In 1982, the Einstein Estate transferred Einstein's personal papers to the Jewish National & University Library in Jerusalem. President Avraham Harman of The Hebrew University and Milton Handler of the American Friends of the Hebrew University worked on the transfer of the material to Jerusalem. In subsequent years, additional material was sent from Einstein's Princeton home. The Bern Dibner Curatorship, which manages the Albert Einstein Archives, was established in 1988 by the Dibner Fund of Connecticut, USA. + +The first curator of the Einstein Archives was Manfred Waserman whose term extended from 1988 to 1989. He was succeeded by Ze'ev Rosenkranz who served in that role from 1989 to 2003. The catalogue was made available online in 2003. Since 2004, Roni Grosz has been the head of the Archives. The Einstein Archives became part of the Hebrew University's Library Authority in January 2008. In July of that year, the Archives moved to the Levy Building on the Givat Ram campus. Since March 19, 2012, the Archives have digitized and made available increasingly more of Einstein's works online. Princeton University Press has also been active in this effort. + + +== See also == +Albert Einstein Square (Jerusalem) +Einstein family +Einstein Papers Project +List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +The Albert Einstein Archives website +Einstein Archives Online \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tomatis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tomatis-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..15668a7fe --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tomatis-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +title: "Alfred Tomatis" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tomatis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:13.348746+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Alfred Tomatis (1 January 1920 – 25 December 2001) was a French otolaryngologist and inventor. He received his Doctorate in Medicine from the Paris School of Medicine. His alternative medicine theories of hearing and listening are known as the Tomatis method or Audio-Psycho-Phonology (APP). +Tomatis' approach, a type of auditory integration training, is known as the Tomatis Method. It is promoted as being of benefit to people with autism, but there is no good evidence to support these claims and the Method has been classified as a pseudoscience. + + +== Tomatis' life and work == + +Alfred Tomatis grew up in a musical family in France. His father was an opera singer, and he spent much of his childhood traveling with him and watching his opera performances from the wings. At an early age, however, he and his parents decided he was not fit for the stage. So he went into medicine and eventually became an Ear, Nose and Throat physician. +Soon after he began his practice, his father began referring him opera colleagues with vocal problems. Tomatis soon discovered traditional treatments inadequate but also that there was very little research on the voice itself. He formulated the theory that many vocal problems were really hearing problems. His theory that "the voice does not produce what the ear does not hear", is the hallmark of his research and his method. He discovered that the voices of opera singers had damaged their own muscles of the middle ears. With damaged hearing, they were forcing their voices to produce sounds in registers they could no longer hear. +In his attempt to retrain his patients, he developed the Electronic Ear, a device which utilizes electronic gating, bone conduction transducers and sound filters to enhance the uppermost missing frequencies. The goal is to tonify the muscles of the middle ear in order to sensitize the listener to the missing frequencies. +Tomatis began treating a number of other problems with the same methods, including reading problems, dyslexia, depression, severe schizophrenia, and even autism. He found evidence that many of these problems result from a failure of communication, which has to do with listening and the ear. +Scientific reports showed that the ear starts forming a few days after conception and that the ear is fully developed by the fourth month of pregnancy. Tomatis theorized that information coming from the fetal ear stimulates and guides the development of the brain. He believed that a number of auditory communication problems begin in pregnancy, with the fetus not properly responding to the voice of the mother. Tomatis theorized that the whole body is involved in the production of speech and language. He stated that reading, even silent reading, is an activity of the ear. He recommended reading out loud, not only for children and by children, but also by adults, for 30 minutes a day. He claimed this not only stimulates the brain but is the best way to learn. +His most controversial method attempts to lead autistic children to recognize and respond to their mother's voice. The electronic ear, he maintained, could simulate the sound of the mother's voice as heard in the uterus, and to lead the child gradually to accept and respond to her real unfiltered voice. He reported that this method often brought startling results, with children crying with joy as they recognized their mother's voice for the first time. +In many of the differing issues he addressed, Tomatis believed that many problems of learning disabilities, dyslexia, schizophrenia, and depression were caused by some trauma resulting from broken relationships and poor communication. He found that treatment of these maladies requires the cooperation of the parents and even grandparents. +In his autobiography, Tomatis recounts the many run-ins he had with the medical establishment in both France and Canada, where he later worked. Eventually he left the orthodox medical community, admitting that his practice was beyond the scope of normative allopathic comprehension. He named his new field audio-psycho-phonology. + + +== Tomatis Method == +The Tomatis Method is a type of auditory integration training. It has been classified as a pseudoscience. +Due to the lack of scientific basis and the wide range of diseases it claimed to treat, French authorities have always considered Tomatis sound therapy as an alternative medicine which should not be promoted. +In general there is no good evidence that auditory integration training, such as that offered in Tomatis therapy, is of any benefit to people with autism. +Tomatis reported in his autobiography that he regretted not providing scientific colleagues with more statistical evidence for his work along with his many publications, but he said that the benefits of his methods are difficult to measure. + + +== The Tomatis effect == +Tomatis adapted his techniques to target diverse disorders including auditory processing problems, dyslexia, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, autism, and sensory processing and motor-skill difficulties. It is also claimed to have helped adults fight depression, learn foreign languages faster, develop better communication skills, and improve both creativity and on-the-job performance. About some musicians, singers and actors it is also claimed they have said they had found it helpful for fine-tuning their tonal and harmonic skills. +The Tomatis Method uses recordings by Mozart and Gregorian Chant as well as of the patient's mother's voice. Tomatis' use of Mozart is not to be confused with so-called Mozart Effect popularized by American author and music researcher Don Campbell. Although Tomatis coined the phrase, his method is not directly related to claims that listening to Mozart increases intelligence. +Tomatis wrote fourteen books and over two thousand articles. His Ear and Language, The Conscious Ear, The Ear and the Voice and We are all Multilingual have been translated into English, the latter by author David Charles Manners. + + +== Awards and honors == +Tomatis' awards and honors include: + +Knights of Public Health (1951) +Gold Medal for Scientific Research Brussels (1958) +Grand Medal of Vermeil from the City of Paris (1962) +Price Isaure Clemence (1967) +Gold Medal of the Society "Arts, Sciences and Letters" (1968) +Commander's Cultural and Artistic Merit (1970) +Medal of Honor Society for Promoting Arts and Letters (1992). +Honorary Member of the Dorstmundt-Institut in Munich +Honorary Member of the University of Potchefstroom, in South Africa, Faculty of Psychology + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)-0.md index 10c37fe36..c3064df38 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Eclipse_(book)" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:32:32.056506+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:48.457675+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..63c3d0423 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Examination_of_the_Philosophy_of_Bacon" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:57.844596+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon (French: Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon) is a posthumous work by Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre, analyzing and criticizing the philosophy of Francis Bacon. It was published in 1836 and translated into English by Richard Lebrun in 1998. + + +== Thesis == +Maistre considers Bacon to be the fountainhead of a destructive rationalistic ideology, blaming him for much of the scientism and atheism of the Age of Enlightenment. The argumentation against Bacon's philosophy is based on Maistre's epistemology first enunciated in the St Petersburg Dialogues (1819), according to which science depends on the innate ideas that are common to all human minds. Without such first principles, Maistre argues, experiments would be useless because there would be no basis for judging their validity. Maistre also argues that genius plays a pivotal role in great scientific discoveries, as demonstrated by inspired intellects such as Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, contrary to Bacon's theory about conforming to a mechanistic method. + + +== Reception == +Although not as well known as some of Maistre's other works, its importance has long been recognized in France. Augustin Bonnetty remarked that "it would perhaps be necessary to go back to Pascal's Lettres provinciales to find a more severe, more mocking, more pointed critique." Gustave Flaubert quoted a few sentences from the work in his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881)—a critique of bourgeoisie society: + +“Bacon est absolument dépourvu de l’esprit d’analyse ; non seulement ne savait pas résoudre les questions, mais ne savait pas même les poser. // Bacon, absolutely destitute of the spirit of analysis, not only did not know how to resolve questions, but did not even know how to pose them.” +“Bacon, man étranger à toutes les sciences et dont toutes les idées fondamentales étaient fausses. // Bacon, a man foreign to all sciences and whose fundamental ideas were false to the point of ridiculousness!” +Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, one of the most distinguished literary critics in nineteenth-century France, thought that Maistre's chapters on final causes and on the union of religion and science contained "certainly some of the finest pages that have ever been written in a human language." +Scholars have also claimed that Maistre's work anticipated the philosophy of modern science. According to Frederick Holdsworth, Maistre described for the first time many of the principles on which modern scientific method is based on such matters as the nature of causality, the inevitable human-centeredness of all scientific understanding, the role of intuition in scientific discovery, and the inescapability of metaphysical considerations. Larry Siedentop concluded that Maistre reached "important and original conclusions about scientific method – conclusions which have since been accepted by the philosophy of science." Owen Bradley claims that "Maistre's critique of Enlightenment notions of science is significant in its own right as a highly modern approach to the history of science." + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..89de5b034 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Bad Science (Taubes book)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Science_(Taubes_book)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:49.594885+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion is book of science history by Gary Taubes about the early years (1989–1991) of the cold fusion controversy. + + +== Overview == +This text is not a scholarly work, but a popular retelling of the events, based on interviews with over 260 people. The book presents a timeline of the events, making the case that the cold fusion field has many examples of poorly performed science. The actions of Martin Fleischmann, Stanley Pons, and Steven E. Jones, the scientists who made the dramatic first claims of fusion, are described in rich detail. The book then shows the worldwide reaction and later disrepute of the cold fusion field, with Taubes placing himself in the side of "good science". Taubes says at the end that cold fusion had only demonstrated that research can continue even if the phenomenon doesn't actually exist, as long as there is funding available. Taubes had previously written an article for Science in which he insinuates that the cold fusion work of A&M University was fraudulent. + + +== Reception == + +The book received a positive review in American Journal of Physics. While observing that the book was "readable, suspenseful, and insightful", the reviewer criticized it for including too many footnotes (over 300), some of which were deemed unimportant. + + +== References == + + +=== Bibliography === +A. F. Burr (June 1994). "Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion" (book review)". Am. J. Phys. 62 (6): 575. Bibcode:1994AmJPh..62..575T. doi:10.1119/1.17527. +Thomas F. Gieryn (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (illustrated ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 184. ISBN 0-226-29262-2. taubes cold fusion. +Taubes, Gary (15 June 1990). "Cold fusion conundrum at Texas A&M". Science. Vol. 248, no. 4961. pp. 1299–1304. Bibcode:1990Sci...248.1299T. doi:10.1126/science.248.4961.1299. PMID 17735269. +Philip Mirowski, Esther-Mirjam Sent (2002). Science bought and sold: essays in the economics of science (illustrated ed.). University of Chicago Press. p. 126. ISBN 978-0-226-53856-3. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women-0.md index da60ddb29..09b460bba 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Biological_Laboratory_for_Women" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:09:19.187218+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:32.655403+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_Yellow new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e69de29bb diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a246b8205 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Biafran Research and Production" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafran_Research_and_Production" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:33.912878+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Biafran Research and Production or Research and Production (RAP) was a scientific and engineering research institution of the Republic of Biafra that researched and manufactured military technology for the Biafran Armed Forces during the Nigerian Civil War. +RAP was founded in April 1967 by Biafran scientists at the University of Biafra (now University of Nigeria) to independently manufacture weapons and technology that were difficult for the Biafran military to acquire from abroad due to the Nigerian blockade of Biafra. Technologies produced by chemists included incendiaries, smoke signals, detonators, napalm, primers, rocket fuels, cocktails, and bombs. Engineering groups produced grenade and rocket casings, mortar shells, bullets, and armored vehicles. One of the best known weapons was Ogbunigwe, a family of highly effective explosive devices that killed thousands of Nigerian soldiers in a single blast. Scientists at RAP additionally experimented with the development of chemical and biological weapons. +RAP allowed Biafra to unexpectedly fight an extended war against the Soviet and British-backed Nigerian military, while Biafra received comparatively little international military aid. +The weapons and vehicles produced by RAP are on display at the National War Museum, Umuahia. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Astronomers-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Astronomers-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..706f0d5b0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Astronomers-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_Encyclopedia_of_Astronomers" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:35.876094+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers (BEA) is a two-volume biographical dictionary, first published in 2007, with a second edition released in 2014. The work covers astronomers from all regions, born anytime between antiquity and mid-1918. It includes more than 1500 biographies of both well-known and more obscure astronomers, produced by 410 contributors. +The encyclopedia has been published in both a print and online format by the publisher, Springer. + + +== Editions == +Hockey, Thomas A.; Virginia Trimble; Thomas R. Williams; Katherine Bracher, eds. (2007). Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. New York: Springer. Bibcode:2007bea..book.....H. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7. ISBN 9780387310220. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers at Google Books + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +Publisher's webpage (1st Edition) +Publisher's webpage (2nd Edition) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonk new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e69de29bb diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..98d09ec10 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Brian Josephson" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:16.307860+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Brian David Josephson (born 4 January 1940) is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever for his discovery of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a Ph.D. student at Cambridge. +Josephson has spent his academic career as a member of the Theory of Condensed Matter Group in Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. He has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, since 1962, and served as Professor of Physics from 1974 until 2007. +In the early 1970s, Josephson took up Transcendental Meditation and turned his attention to issues outside the boundaries of mainstream science. He set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at Cavendish to explore the idea of intelligence in nature, the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness, and the synthesis of science and Eastern mysticism, broadly known as quantum mysticism. He has expressed support for topics such as parapsychology, water memory and cold fusion, which has made him a focus of criticism from fellow scientists. + +== Education == +Brian David Josephson was born on 4 January 1940 in Cardiff, Wales, to Jewish parents, Abraham Josephson and Mimi Weisbard. He attended Cardiff High School, where he credits some of the school masters for having helped him, particularly the physics master, Emrys Jones, who introduced him to theoretical physics. In 1957, he went up to Cambridge, where he initially read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. After completing Maths Part II in two years, and finding it somewhat sterile, he decided to switch to physics. +Josephson was known at Cambridge as a brilliant but shy student. Physicist John Waldram recalled overhearing Nicholas Kurti, an examiner from Oxford, discuss Josephson's exam results with David Shoenberg, Reader in Physics at Cambridge, and asking: "Who is this chap Josephson? He seems to be going through the theory like a knife through butter." While still an undergraduate, he published a paper on the Mössbauer effect, pointing out a crucial issue other researchers had overlooked. According to one eminent physicist speaking to Physics World, he wrote several papers important enough to assure him a place in the history of physics even without his discovery of the Josephson effect. +Josephson graduated in 1960 and became a research student in Cambridge's Mond Laboratory on the old Cavendish site, where he was supervised by Brian Pippard. American physicist Philip Anderson—also a future Nobel Prize laureate—spent a year in Cambridge in 1961–1962, and recalled that having Josephson in a class was "a disconcerting experience for a lecturer, I can assure you, because everything had to be right or he would come up and explain it to me after class." It was during this period, as a Ph.D. student in 1962, that he carried out the research that led to his discovery of the Josephson effect; the Cavendish Laboratory unveiled a plaque on the Mond Building dedicated to the discovery in November 2012. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1962, and received his Ph.D. in 1964 with a thesis titled Non-linear conduction in superconductors. + +== Career == +Josephson spent a postdoctoral year in the United States (1965–1966) as Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. After returning to Cambridge, he was made Assistant Director of Research in the Cavendish Laboratory in 1967, where he remained a member of the Theory of Condensed Matter Group for the rest of his career. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1970, and was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship by Cornell University the same year. In 1972, he became Reader in Physics—and in 1974 was appointed Professor of Physics, a position he held until his retirement in 2007. +A practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM) since the early 1970s, Josephson became a visiting faculty member in 1975 of the Maharishi European Research University in the Netherlands, part of the TM movement. He also held visiting professorships at Wayne State University in 1983, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1984, and the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1987. + +== Josephson effect == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5e3335dac --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Brian Josephson" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:16.307860+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Josephson was 22-years-old when he did the work on quantum tunnelling that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973. He discovered that a supercurrent could tunnel through a thin barrier, predicting, according to physicist Andrew Whitaker, that "at a junction of two superconductors, a current will flow even if there is no drop in voltage; that when there is a voltage drop, the current should oscillate at a frequency related to the drop in voltage; and that there is a dependence on any magnetic field." This became known as the Josephson effect and the junction as a Josephson junction. +Josephson's calculations were published in Physics Letters (chosen by Pippard because it was a new journal) in a paper titled "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling," received on 8 June 1962 and published on 1 July. They were confirmed experimentally by Philip Anderson and John Rowell of Bell Labs in Princeton; this appeared in their paper, "Probable Observation of the Josephson Superconducting Tunneling Effect," submitted to Physical Review Letters in January 1963. +Before Anderson and Rowell confirmed the calculations, the American physicist John Bardeen, who had shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics (and who shared it again in 1972), objected to Josephson's work. He submitted an article to Physical Review Letters on 25 July 1962, arguing that "there can be no such superfluid flow." The disagreement led to a confrontation in September that year at Queen Mary College, London, at the Eighth International Conference on Low Temperature Physics. When Bardeen (then one of the most eminent physicists in the world) began speaking, Josephson (still a student) stood up and interrupted him. The men exchanged views, reportedly in a civil and soft-spoken manner. See also: John Bardeen § Josephson effect controversy. +Whitaker writes that the discovery of the Josephson effect led to "much important physics," including the invention of SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices), which are used in geology to make highly sensitive measurements, as well as in medicine and computing. IBM used Josephson's work in 1980 to build a prototype of a computer that would be up to 100 times faster than the IBM 3033 mainframe. +Josephson was awarded several important prizes for his discovery, including the 1969 Research Corporation Award for outstanding contributions to science, and the Hughes Medal and Holweck Prize in 1972. In 1973, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the $122,000 award with two other scientists who had also worked on quantum tunnelling. Josephson was awarded half the prize "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects". The other half of the award was shared equally by Japanese physicist Leo Esaki of the Thomas Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, and Norwegian–American physicist Ivar Giaever of General Electric in Schenectady, New York. + +== Parapsychology == + +=== Early interest and Transcendental Meditation === +Josephson became interested in philosophy of mind in the late 1960s and, in particular, in the mind–body problem, and is one of the few scientists to argue that parapsychological phenomena (telepathy, psychokinesis and other paranormal themes) may be real. In 1971, he began practising Transcendental Meditation (TM). +Winning the Nobel Prize in 1973 gave Josephson the freedom to work in less orthodox areas, and he became increasingly involved—including during science conferences, to the irritation of fellow scientists—in talking about meditation, telepathy, and higher states of consciousness. In 1974, he angered scientists during a colloquium of molecular and cellular biologists in Versailles by inviting them to read the Bhagavad Gita (5th – 2nd century BCE) and the work of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the TM movement, and by arguing about special states of consciousness achieved through meditation. "Nothing forces us," one scientist shouted at him, "to listen to your wild speculations." Biophysicist Henri Atlan wrote that the session ended in uproar. +In May that year, Josephson addressed a symposium held to welcome the Maharishi to Cambridge. The following month, at the first Canadian conference on psychokinesis, he was one of 21 scientists who tested claims by Matthew Manning, a Cambridgeshire teenager who said he had psychokinetic abilities; Josephson apparently told a reporter that he believed Manning's powers were a new kind of energy. He later withdrew or corrected the statement. +Josephson said that Trinity College's tradition of interest in the paranormal meant that he did not dismiss these ideas out of hand. Several presidents of the Society for Psychical Research had been fellows of Trinity, and the Perrott-Warrick Fund, set up in Trinity in 1937 to fund parapsychology research, is still administered by the college. He continued to explore the idea that there is intelligence in nature, particularly after reading Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975), and in 1979 took up a more advanced form of TM, known as the TM-Sidhi program. According to Anderson, the TM movement produced a poster showing Josephson levitating several inches above the floor. Josephson argued that meditation could lead to mystical and scientific insights, and that, as a result of it, he had come to believe in a creator. + +=== Fundamental Fysiks Group === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cef560e63 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Brian Josephson" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:16.307860+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Josephson became involved in the mid-1970s with a group of physicists associated with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, who were investigating paranormal claims. They had organized themselves loosely into the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and had effectively become the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) "house theorists," according to historian of science David Kaiser. Core members in the group were Elizabeth Rauscher, George Weissmann, John Clauser, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, Fred Alan Wolf, Fritjof Capra, Henry Stapp, Philippe Eberhard and Gary Zukav. +There was significant government interest at the time in quantum mechanics – the American government was financing research at SRI into telepathy – and physicists able to understand it found themselves in demand. The Fundamental Fysiks Group used ideas from quantum physics, particularly Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement, to explore issues such as action at a distance, clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing and psychokinesis. +In 1976, Josephson travelled to California at the invitation of one of the Fundamental Fysiks Group members, Jack Sarfatti, who introduced him to others including laser physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, and quantum physicist Henry Stapp. The San Francisco Chronicle covered Josephson's visit. +Josephson co-organised a symposium on consciousness at Cambridge in 1978, publishing the proceedings as Consciousness and the Physical World (1980), with neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran. A conference on "Science and Consciousness" followed a year later in Cordoba, Spain, attended by physicists and Jungian psychoanalysts, and addressed by Josephson, Fritjof Capra and David Bohm (1917–1992). +By 1996, Josephson had set up the Mind–Matter Unification Project at the Cavendish Laboratory to explore intelligent processes in nature. In 2002, he told Physics World: "Future science will consider quantum mechanics as the phenomenology of particular kinds of organised complex system. Quantum entanglement would be one manifestation of such organisation, paranormal phenomena another." + +=== Reception and views on the scientific community === +Josephson delivered the Pollock Memorial Lecture in 2006, the Hermann Staudinger Lecture in 2009 and the Sir Nevill Mott Lecture in 2010. + +Matthew Reisz wrote in Times Higher Education in 2010 that Josephson has long been one of physics' "more colourful figures." His support for unorthodox causes has attracted criticism from fellow scientists since the 1970s, including from Philip Anderson. Josephson regards the criticism as prejudice, and believes that it has served to deprive him of an academic support network. +Josephson has repeatedly criticised "science by consensus," arguing that the scientific community is too quick to reject certain kinds of ideas. "Anything goes among the physics community – cosmic wormholes, time travel," he argues, "just so long as it keeps its distance from anything mystical or New Age-ish." Referring to this position as "pathological disbelief," he holds it responsible for the rejection by academic journals of papers on the paranormal. He has compared parapsychology to the theory of continental drift, proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) to explain observations that were otherwise inexplicable, which was resisted and ridiculed until evidence led to its acceptance after Wegener's death. +Science writer Martin Gardner criticised Josephson in 1980 for complaining to The New York Review of Books, along with three other physicists, about an article by J. A. Wheeler that ridiculed parapsychology. Several physicists complained in 2001 when, in a Royal Mail booklet celebrating the Nobel Prize's centenary, Josephson wrote that Britain was at the forefront of research into telepathy. Physicist David Deutsch said the Royal Mail had "let itself be hoodwinked" into supporting nonsense, although another physicist, Robert Matthews, suggested that Deutsch was skating on thin ice given the latter's own work on parallel universes and time travel. +In 2004, Josephson criticised an experiment by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to test claims by Russian schoolgirl Natasha Demkina that she could see inside people's bodies using a special kind of vision. The experiment involved her being asked to match six people to their confirmed medical conditions (plus one with none); to pass the test she had to make five correct matches, but made only four. Josephson argued that this was statistically significant, and that the experiment had set her up to fail. One of the researchers, Richard Wiseman, professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, responded by highlighting that the conditions of the experiment had been agreed to before it started, and the potential significance of her claims warranted a higher than normal bar. Keith Rennolis, professor of applied statistics at the University of Greenwich, supported Josephson's position, asserting that the experiment was "woefully inadequate" to determine any effect. +Josephson's reputation for promoting unorthodox causes was cemented by his support for the ideas of water memory and cold fusion, both of which are rejected by mainstream scientists. Water memory is purported to provide a possible explanation for homeopathy; it is dismissed by a majority of scientists as pseudoscience, although he has expressed support for it since attending a conference at which French immunologist Jacques Benveniste first proposed it. Cold fusion is the hypothesis that nuclear reactions can occur at room temperature. When Martin Fleischmann, the British chemist who pioneered research into it, died in 2012, Josephson wrote a supportive obituary in the Guardian, and had published in Nature a letter complaining that its obituary had failed to give Fleischmann due credit. Antony Valentini of Imperial College London withdrew Josephson's invitation to a 2010 conference on the de Broglie–Bohm theory because of his work on the paranormal, although it was reinstated after complaints. +Josephson's defense of paranormal claims and of cold fusion have led him to being described as an exemplar of a sufferer of the hypothetical Nobel disease. + +== Recognition == + +=== Memberships === + +=== Awards === + +=== Honorary degrees === + +== Selected works == + +== See also == +Josephson voltage standard +Josephson vortex +Long Josephson junction +Pi Josephson junction +Phi Josephson junction +List of Jewish Nobel laureates +List of Nobel laureates in Physics +List of physicists +Scientific phenomena named after people + +== Notes == + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b8d1ececf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Brian Josephson" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:16.307860+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Further reading == +Brian Josephson's home page, University of Cambridge. +Brian Josephson, academia.edu. +"bdj50: Conference in Cambridge to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Brian Josephson’s Seminal Work", Department of Physics, University of Cambridge. +Anderson, Philip. "How Josephson Discovered His Effect", Physics Today, November 1970. Anderson's account of Josephson's discovery; he taught the graduate course in solid-state/many-body theory in which Josephson was a student. +Barone, A. and Paterno, G. Physics and Applications of the Josephson Effect, Wiley, 1982. +Bertlmann, R. A. and Zeilinger, A. (eds.), Quantum (Un)speakables: From Bell to Quantum Information, Springer, 2002. +Buckel, Werner and Kleiner, Reinhold. Superconductivity: Fundamentals and Applications, VCH, 1991. +Jibu, Mari and Yasue, Kunio. Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness: An Introduction, John Benjamins Publishing, 1995. +Josephson, Brian; Rubik, Beverly A.; Fontana, David; Lorimer, David. "Defining consciousness", Nature, 358(618), 20 August 1992. +Rosen, Joe. "Josephson, Brian David," Encyclopedia of Physics, Infobase Publishing, 2009, pp. 165–166. +Stapp, Henry. "Quantum Approaches to Consciousness," in Philip David Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch and Evan Thompson (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, 2007. +Stenger, Victor J. The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology, Prometheus Books, 1995. + +== External links == + +Brian Josephson on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, 12 December 1973 The Discovery of Tunnelling Supercurrents \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8b7b21cc7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Cattle Breeding Centre" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_Breeding_Centre" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:35.113535+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Cattle Breeding Centre was a veterinary research centre at Shinfield in the United Kingdom. + + +== History == +The site opened in February 1943 as the Reading Centre for the Artificial Insemination of Dairy Cattle. It had Shorthorn and Guernsey cattle. In January 1944 the site produced the world's first calf produced by artificial insemination, working with the Agricultural Improvement Council. Another site had been opened at Cambridge in November 1942. +The site closed in 1991. + + +=== Visits === +On Thursday 15 November 1979, the site was visited by President General Suharto of Indonesia; the President had come to power in a coup in 1965, and the visit was attended by protestors from Reading University Amnesty International group. On Wednesday 29 October 1980, the site was visited by the second President of Botswana, Quett Masire. + + +=== Demolition === +The site was demolished by the University of Reading and sold for housing (360 houses) in 2003. + + +== Structure == +The site was east of the A327, south of the M4, around a half-mile east of the former headquarters of Berkshire County Council. A short section of the National Cycle Network 50 runs east–west past the former site. + + +== Function == +The site worked with artificial insemination (AI) of cattle and pigs. + + +== See also == +Former Meat Research Institute in North Somerset + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d3e929da8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Center for Strategic Research (Iran)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Strategic_Research_(Iran)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:36.240689+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Center for Strategic Research or Institute for Strategic Research (Persian: مرکز تحقیقات استراتژیک) is a leading Iranian think tank on strategy issues. It is the research arm of the Iranian state's Expediency Discernment Council. Prof. Mohammad Reza Majidi is the head of center. Before that, the head of organization was Ali Akbar Velayati who replaced former head Hassan Rouhani, the former President of Iran. It was established in 1989.It publishes Foreign Relations Quarterly, Rahbord (Strategy) in Persian and Iranian Review of Foreign Affairsin English. + + +== Departments == +The CSR has six affiliated departments: + +Politics and International Relations Research Department (This department publishes 3 scientific journals: Foreign Relations Quarterly, A quarterly Journal of Strategy, Iranian Review of Foreign Affairs). +Infrastructure and Production Research Department (This department publishes Gozaresh Rahbordi (Strategic Report)) +Economic Research Department (This department publishes Gozaresh-e Pazhouheshhay-e Eqtesadi (Economic Research Report)) +Cultural Research Department (This department publishes Gozareshat-e Rahbordi (Strategic Reports)) +Legal Research and Jurisprudential Studies Department (Publication: Gozaresh-e Rahbordi (Strategic Report)) +Executive and Information Department + + +== People == +Presidents +Mohammad Mousavi Khoeiniha (1989–1992) +Hassan Rouhani (1992–2013) +Ali Akbar Velayati (2013–2017) +Researchers + +Saeed Hajjarian + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Official website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..31d44e1f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +title: "Central Research Laboratories" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Research_Laboratories" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:37.392491+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Central Research Laboratories, often referred to as CRL, was a British research laboratory that originally belonged to the EMI Corporation. + + +== History == +During the period of 1927–29 EMI invested in developing a research and innovation centre that arguably set the tone for many of the technological advancements that would occur over the next 80 years in the UK and was held in extremely high regard globally. +After years operating in central London and across various greater London locations, a new company site was built in the 1980s in Hayes, Middlesex. Hayes was often referred to as EMI Town, due to the presence of various company businesses, including the Gramophone Company HQ, which later became known as HMV. The lab's first director was Isaac Shoenberg, a pioneer of television. +In 1996 the company formally became known as CRL Ltd after a management buy-out, in which EMI retained a nominal ownership. +The company's business model became that of an incubator, that effectively funded innovations and research projects and once the products became 'viable', they were established into standalone subsidiary companies, that typically continued to operate out of their HQ office. +In the year 2000, the company floated under a new parent company name Scipher Plc, which for the next two years was the UK's most admired and valuable tech stock on the FTSE 250 index. +The Scipher brand included: + +CRL – This remained the heart of the business. It continued to act as the innovation centre of the business and initiated numerous o going research projects and initiatives. It also retained control of the majority of the existing products and technologies that had been developed where commercial agreements already existed. It also continued with Ministry of Defence (MoD) projects, which remained private under official secrecy obligations.. +QED – An intellectual Property (IP) business that proactively registered and managed new and old patents for its parent company and third-parties, and also offered an infringement investigation and litigation service for companies that felt their patents had been infringed. This alone resulted in millions of pounds of revenue being generated from the patents CRL had inherited as part of the management buy-out from EMI. +Sensaura Technology – Originally a research project within CRL and then formed as a separate company in 1998, 'Sensaura 3D positional audio' and 'virtualisation technology', was at one point licensed and appeared on over 250 million hardware devices worldwide, including laptops, PC's, sound cards and headphones. The technology was also developed into a middleware software solution, named GameCODA, that was licensed directly to the computer gaming development sector, (including Lucas Art, Hasbro, Rock Star Games, Criterion), so special effects and sounds could be built directly into their games for the first time. Sensaura 3D positional audio also appeared on the first Microsoft Xbox and later on the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Wii. The company also won the coveted MacRobert Award for technology and as a result had an exhibition display within the London Science Museum between 2001 and 2002. Sensaura Technology was acquired by US giant Creative Labs in late 2003 and the technology was absorbed into their product portfolio, effectively neutralising the company brand. + + +=== Company Decline === +After the Scipher company flotation, many key long-serving staff members started to exercise their extensive share options as they matured and took early retirement. This resulted in the loss of much of the intellectual resource that the company relied upon. The outcome of this, alongside the sale of the 'darling' Sensaura Technology division to global giant Creative Labs, heavily impacted on the company's strategic road map and also had a catastrophic effect on the company's stock market perception – and hence its share price. +Scipher Plc very quickly slipped into a difficult position that resulted in the company going into liquidation in 2006. +During liquidation process much of the coveted IP and patents that the company owned were sold to technology and manufacturing companies in what one scientific journal referred to as a 'Yard Sale'. This subsequently enabled many to these purchasers to become and extend their positions as market leaders and generate significant business successes and profits. + + +=== CRL Reborn === +After the demise of Scipher Plc many questions were asked about how a historic organisation like CRL was allowed collapse and disappear so easily. Many senior individuals within the scientific and engineering sectors openly referred to it as 'a travesty' that should have been avoided. +In 2016, a private investment organisation, with the support of Brunel University London and HEFCE, the Central Research Laboratory was reborn in the form of an innovation incubation centre, only a stone's throw from the previous CRL site in Hayes. Some of CRL's previous employees were invited to the site for the occasion. + + +== Innovations == +CRL was responsible for either developing or initiating many innovations including: + +The EMI 405-line television system, adopted by the BBC, was developed at the site, with early television cameras developed by Australian James Dwyer McGee, and William Francis Tedham (1902–2000), first patented in May 1932 +The development of the CAT (CT) scanner +Early airborne radars such as H2S. +Stereo sound and numerous audio mixing technologies +The commercialisation of television through CRT improvement +Early Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology +3D audio virtualisation technology +Magnetic technology that was applied to the first commercially used credit cards globally +It also undertook numerous undisclosed innovation MoD projects. +The company also registered early patents and intellectual property rights that are now commonly utilised in technologies worldwide, including: + +Finger print technology +Eye retina scanning technologies +Other software and digital technologies that are common place in many everyday product today relating to the internet and application development. +The company a;so received many awards over the years including the Institute of Physics Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize, in 1986. + + +== Location == +The last company site is east of the A437, north-west of M4 junction 3. +In the 1990s, the site became known as CRL. It is situated next to the EMI Archive Trust. + + +== See also == +BBC Research & Development +1942 Herefordshire TRE Halifax crash + + +== References == + + +== External links == +EMI Archive Trust \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bd87ae6ec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Lindbergh_Chair_in_Aerospace_History" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:13.200482+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History, also known as the Lindbergh Chair, is a one-year senior fellowship hosted by the U.S. National Air and Space Museum (NASM), to assist a scholar in the research and composition of a book about aerospace history. Named for the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, the position is competitive: one experienced scholar is selected each year from multiple applicants worldwide. Up to $100,000 is granted to the winner. +The Lindbergh Chair is one of four research fellowships administered by NASM within the Smithsonian Institution: the others are the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellowship, the A. Verville Fellowship, and the Postdoctoral Earth and Planetary Sciences Fellowship. Announced in 1977 at the 50th anniversary of Lindbergh's famous solo flight, 1978 was the first year that the Lindbergh Chair was occupied—British aviation historian Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith was selected as the first recipient. +Each Lindbergh Chair application is judged relative to the suitability of its proposal, the scholarly record of the applicant, the availability of relevant museum staff advisors knowledgeable on the proposed topic, whether the NASM can provide the specific resources, and the applicability of the proposal to NASM's work-in-progress series. The winner is expected to reside in the Washington, D.C., area for nine months to a year, the academic year generally starting in September and ending by the following August. He or she is also expected to take part in discussions with museum staff and to attend professional seminars and colloquia. Along with access to primary research materials, the winner is given the use of an office, a phone and a computer. + + +== Past winners == + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c718d23c3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Climate Change Denial" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:54.287775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand is a 2011 non-fiction book about climate-change denial, coauthored by Haydn Washington and John Cook, with a foreword by Naomi Oreskes. Washington had a background in environmental science prior to authoring the work; Cook, educated in physics, founded (2007) the website Skeptical Science, which compiles peer-reviewed evidence of global warming. The book was first published in hardcover and paperback formats in 2011 by Earthscan, a division of Routledge. +The book presents an in-depth analysis and refutation of climate-change denial, going over several arguments point-by-point and disproving them with peer-reviewed evidence from the scientific consensus for climate change. The authors assert that those denying climate change engage in tactics including cherry picking data purported to support their specific viewpoints, and attacking the integrity of climate scientists. Washington and Cook use social-science theory to examine the phenomenon of climate-change denial in the wider public, and call this phenomenon a form of pathology. +The book traces financial support for climate-change denial to the fossil-fuel industry, asserting that its companies have attempted to influence public opinion on the matter. Washington and Cook write that politicians have a tendency to use weasel words as part of a propaganda tactic through the use of spin, as a way to deflect public interest away from climate change and remain passive on the issue. The authors conclude that if the public ceased engaging in denial, the problem of climate change could be realistically addressed. Climate change denial is a serious threat to the planet and needs to be addressed urgently, as the consequences of inaction are dire. +For his research on the book, and efforts in communicating the essence of climate-change science to the general public, John Cook won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. Climate Change Denial received a positive reception in reviews from publications including: The Ecologist, ECOS magazine, academic journal Natures Sciences Sociétés, the journal Education published by the New South Wales Teachers Federation. + +== Background == +The book was coauthored by Australian environmental science researchers Haydn Washington and John Cook. Washington worked for over 30 years as an environmental scientist prior to writing the book. His previously published books on the subject of environmental science include: Ecosolutions (1991), A Sense of Wonder (2002), and The Wilderness Knot (2009). In 2015, Washington was a visiting fellow with the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales. +Cook's education includes a background in physics. Prior to his work on the book, Cook founded the website Skeptical Science, which compiles peer-reviewed evidence of climate change. He placed on the site the most common assertions made by individuals arguing against the scientific consensus for climate change, with evidence to refute each point they made. After the publication of Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand, Cook coauthored another book on the subject, Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis: Volume 1 – The Physical Climate (2013). In 2015, Cook served as the climate communication fellow at the University of Queensland. +Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand was first published in 2011 by Earthscan, a division of Routledge. Both hardcover and paperback editions were released in April 2011. It was released the same year by the publisher in an electronic book format. A second eBook release was published by Routledge in 2012. The book was made available via Kindle by Amazon.com in May 2013. + +== Contents summary == + +Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand presents a detailed analysis and refutation of climate change denial. In her foreword to the book, Naomi Oreskes writes that people fall victim to the phenomenon of denial due to feeling frightened. The book examines several arguments against global warming, and uses peer-reviewed evidence from the scientific consensus to back-up rationale for disputing the validity of each argument. The methodology of those denying climate change is assessed, including: cherry picking data purporting to support their specific viewpoints, maintaining a high bar for evidence of climate change by those denying it, and criticism of the values of climate scientists themselves. The book puts forth an explanation of why certain individuals, and the wider public, have a tendency to deny the scientific consensus for climate change. +The authors discuss the broader concept of denial using social science theory, noting its occurrence appears in society when individuals are frightened or ashamed of their actions. They write that these motivations, when expanded from an individual to wider society, present themselves as a form of disease. The book identifies climate change denial itself as a pathology afflicting the culture of the planet. The authors lament that an inverse relationship exists between an increasing scientific consensus regarding climate change, and a simultaneous increase in denial within the greater public about the same issue. +The book identifies a corporate underpinning influencing public opinion by way of companies which derive profit from the fossil fuel industry. Washington and Cook write that politicians often use weasel words as a form of spin and propaganda, in order to act as if they are going to do something about climate change, while in actuality remaining passive on the issue. The authors go on to identify a greater level of denial—within the wider public itself. They argue that society enables denial of climate science through inaction and resistance to the scientific consensus. The authors conclude that if the public stopped denying climate change, the problem itself could realistically be significantly addressed. + +== Reception == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d88d15c89 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Climate Change Denial" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Change_Denial" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:54.287775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The book's coauthor John Cook won the 2011 Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge, awarded by the New South Wales Government as part of the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes, and was honoured for his role in communicating the essence of climate change science to the general public. Director of the University of Queensland Global Change Institute, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, cited Cook's research and authorship of Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand as the rationale behind him winning the award. +The Ecologist reviewed the book and described it as: "well researched and painstakingly footnoted". The review concluded: Climate Change Denial is a wise and timely book. ... It deserves an audience". Writing for ECOS magazine, Mary-Lou Considine wrote that the book "dissects objections to the peer-reviewed science" in "forensic detail". Considine recommended the book to those who had previously visited the website Skeptical Science and subsequently wanted to learn more about the wider topic discussed on the site. +In a review of the book by the academic journal Natures Sciences Sociétés, the authors' thesis was praised for its ability to bring reason to their analysis: "This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus solve the climate crisis". Natures Sciences Sociétés recommended the work for multiple stakeholders, concluding: "It will engage scientists, university students, climate change activists as well as the general public seeking to roll back denial and act". +Janine Kitson reviewed the book for the journal Education, a publication of the New South Wales Teachers Federation. Kitson described the work as timely and important within the context of a need for the public to act before a point of no return: "This is a crucial book to read before runaway climate change is truly beyond our control". Her review concluded: "One can only hope that this book will be read by climate deniers so we can start the challenging journey to an ecologically sustainable future". + +== See also == +Merchants of Doubt +Merchants of Doubt (film) +Climate Change Denial Disorder, satirical parody film about a fictional disease +Fear, uncertainty and doubt +Global warming controversy +List of books about the politics of science +Media coverage of climate change +Watts Up With That?, a blog that promotes climate change skepticism or denial +Triumph of Doubt (2020 book) + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Jensen, Derrick; McMillan, Stephanie (2007). As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial. Seven Stories Press. ISBN 978-1-58322-777-0. OCLC 154705030. +Marshall, George (2014). Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1-62040-133-0. OCLC 885302594. +Norgaard, Kari Marie (2011). Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51585-6. OCLC 727944942. +Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M. (2011). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press. ISBN 978-1-60819-394-3. OCLC 461631066. + +== External links == + +Cook, John (29 April 2011). "Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand". Skeptical Science. Archived from the original on 22 September 2015. Retrieved 31 October 2015. +"Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand". CSIRO Publishing. 2015. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 31 October 2015. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-0.md index 238d4a55f..5ae5447dd 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:49.089600+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:38.249335+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-1.md index de1250ec1..10028401b 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:49.089600+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:38.249335+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-2.md index eb52a587a..e08226b1c 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:49.089600+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:38.249335+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-3.md index 2fd91fd1a..dd5f27143 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:49.089600+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:38.249335+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-4.md index 8d1785018..ca2d2d8c4 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-4.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis-4.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 5/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:49.089600+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:38.249335+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7448c219b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: "Consciousness causes collapse" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:30.406153+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The postulate that consciousness causes collapse is an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is postulated to be the main mechanism behind the process of measurement in quantum mechanics. It is a historical interpretation of quantum mechanics that is largely discarded by modern physicists. The idea is attributed to Eugene Wigner who wrote about it in the 1960s, but traces of the idea appear as early as the 1930s. Wigner later rejected this interpretation in the 1970s and 1980s. +This interpretation has been tied to the origin of pseudoscientific currents and New Age movements, specifically quantum mysticism. + +== History == + +=== Earlier work === +According to Werner Heisenberg’s recollections in Physics and Beyond, Niels Bohr is said to have rejected the necessity of a conscious observer in quantum mechanics as early as 1927. +In his 1932 book Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, John von Neumann argued that the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows the collapse of the wave function to be placed at any position in the causal chain from the measurement device to the "subjective perception" of the human observer. However von Neumann did not explicitly relate measurement with consciousness. In 1939, Fritz London and Edmond Bauer argued that the consciousness of the observer played an important role in measurement. However London wrote about consciousness in terms of philosophical phenomenology and not necessarily as a physical process. + +=== Wigner's work === +The idea that "consciousness causes collapse" is attributed to Eugene Wigner who first wrote about it in his 1961 article "Remarks on the mind-body question" and developed it further during the 1960s. Wigner reformulated the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment as Wigner's friend and proposed that the consciousness of an observer is the demarcation line that precipitates collapse of the wave function, independent of any realist interpretation. The mind is postulated to be non-physical and the only true measurement apparatus. +The idea was criticized early by Abner Shimony in 1963 and by Hilary Putnam a year later. +Wigner discarded the conscious collapse interpretation in the later 1970s. In a 1982 lecture, Wigner said that his early view of quantum mechanics should be criticized as solipsism. In 1984, he wrote that he was convinced out of it by the 1970 work of H. Dieter Zeh on quantum decoherence and macroscopic quantum phenomena. + +=== After Wigner === +The idea of consciousness causing collapse has been promoted and developed by Henry Stapp, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, since 1993. + +== Description == + +=== Measurement in standard quantum mechanics === +In the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics predicts only the probabilities for different observed experimental outcomes. What constitutes an observer or a measurement is not directly specified by the theory, and the behavior of a system under measurement and observation is completely different from its usual behavior: the wavefunction that describes a system spreads out into an ever-larger superposition of different possible situations. However, during observation, the wavefunction describing the system collapses to one of several options. If there is no observation, this collapse does not occur, and none of the options ever become less likely. +It can be predicted using quantum mechanics, absent a collapse postulate, that an observer observing a quantum superposition will turn into a superposition of different observers seeing different things. The observer will have a wavefunction which describes all the possible outcomes. Still, in actual experience, an observer never senses a superposition, but always senses that one of the outcomes has occurred with certainty. This apparent conflict between a wavefunction description and classical experience is called the problem of observation (see Measurement problem). + +=== Consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation === +This consciousness causes collapse interpretation has been summarized thus: + +The rules of quantum mechanics are correct but there is only one system which may be treated with quantum mechanics, namely the entire material world. There exist external observers which cannot be treated within quantum mechanics, namely human (and perhaps animal) minds, which perform measurements on the brain causing wave function collapse. + +Stapp has argued for the concept as follows: + +From the point of view of the mathematics of quantum theory it makes no sense to treat a measuring device as intrinsically different from the collection of atomic constituents that make it up. A device is just another part of the physical universe... Moreover, the conscious thoughts of a human observer ought to be causally connected most directly and immediately to what is happening in his brain, not to what is happening out at some measuring device... Our bodies and brains thus become ... parts of the quantum mechanically described physical universe. Treating the entire physical universe in this unified way provides a conceptually simple and logically coherent theoretical foundation... + +== Objections to the interpretation == +Wigner shifted away from "consciousness causes collapse" in his later years. This was partly because he was embarrassed that "consciousness causes collapse" can lead to a kind of solipsism, but also because he decided that he had been wrong to try to apply quantum physics at the scale of everyday life (specifically, he rejected his initial idea of treating macroscopic objects as isolated systems). +Bohr said circa 1927 that it "still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus." +This interpretation relies upon an interactionist form of dualism that is inconsistent with the materialism that is commonly used to understand the brain, and accepted by most scientists. (Materialism assumes that consciousness has no special role in relation to quantum mechanics.) The measurement problem notwithstanding, they point to a causal closure of physics, suggesting a problem with how consciousness and matter might interact, reminiscent of objections to Descartes' substance dualism. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2b9d39018 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Consciousness causes collapse" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_causes_collapse" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:30.406153+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The only form of interactionist dualism that has seemed even remotely tenable in the contemporary picture is one that exploits certain properties of quantum mechanics. There are two ways this might go. First, some [e.g., Eccles 1986] have appealed to the existence of quantum indeterminacy, and have suggested that a nonphysical consciousness might be responsible for filling the resultant causal gaps, determining which values some physical magnitudes might take within an apparently "probabilistic" distribution... This is an audacious and interesting suggestion, but it has a number of problems... A second way in which quantum mechanics bears on the issue of causal closure lies with the fact that in some interpretations of the quantum formalism, consciousness itself plays a vital causal role, being required to bring about the so-called "collapse of the wave-function." This collapse is supposed to occur upon any act of measurement; and in one interpretation, the only way to distinguish a measurement from a nonmeasurement is via the presence of consciousness. This theory is certainly not universally accepted (for a start, it presupposes that consciousness is not itself physical, surely contrary to the views of most physicists), and I do not accept it myself, but in any case it seems that the kind of causal work consciousness performs here is quite different from the kind required for consciousness to play a role in directing behavior... In any case, all versions of interactionist dualism have a conceptual problem that suggests that they are less successful in avoiding epiphenomenalism than they might seem; or at least they are no better off than naturalistic dualism. Even on these views, there is a sense in which the phenomenal is irrelevant. We can always subtract the phenomenal component from any explanatory account, yielding a purely causal component. +The interpretation has also been criticized for not explaining which things have sufficient consciousness to collapse the wave function. Also, it posits an important role for the conscious mind, and it has been questioned how this could be the case for the earlier universe, before consciousness had evolved or emerged. It has been argued that "[consciousness causes collapse] does not allow sensible discussion of Big Bang cosmology or biological evolution". For example, Roger Penrose remarked: "[T]he evolution of conscious life on this planet is due to appropriate mutations having taken place at various times. These, presumably, are quantum events, so they would exist only in linearly superposed form until they finally led to the evolution of a conscious being—whose very existence depends on all the right mutations having 'actually' taken place!" Others further suppose a universal mind (see also panpsychism and panexperientialism). Other researchers have expressed similar objections to the introduction of any subjective element in the collapse of the wavefunction. + +== Testability == +It has been argued that the results of delayed-choice quantum eraser experiments empirically falsify this interpretation. However, the argument was shown to be invalid because an interference pattern would only be visible after post-measurement detections were correlated through use of a coincidence counter; if that was not true, the experiment would allow signaling into the past. The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment has also been used to argue for support of this interpretation, but, as with other arguments, none of the cited references prove or falsify this interpretation. +The central role played by consciousness in this interpretation naturally calls for use of psychological experiments to verify or falsify it. One such approach relies on explaining the empirical presentiment effect quantum mechanically. Another approach makes use of the psychological priming effect to design an appropriate test. Both methods claim verification success. + +== Reception == +A poll was conducted at a quantum mechanics conference in 2011 using 33 participants (including physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers). Researchers found that 6% of participants (2 of the 33) indicated that they believed the observer "plays a distinguished physical role (e.g., wave-function collapse by consciousness)". This poll also states that 55% (18 of the 33) indicated that they believed the observer "plays a fundamental role in the application of the formalism but plays no distinguished physical role". They also mention that "Popular accounts have sometimes suggested that the Copenhagen interpretation attributes such a role to consciousness. In our view, this is to misunderstand the Copenhagen interpretation." + +== See also == +Interpretations of quantum mechanics +Measurement in quantum mechanics +Quantum mind +Quantum Zeno effect + +== References == + +== External links == +Don N. Page, Mindful Sensationalism: A Quantum Framework for Consciousness (2001), arXiv \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-0.md index 13e8ed263..98a43599c 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:50.355903+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:39.508191+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-1.md index 54165d792..53c51f383 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:50.355903+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:39.508191+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-2.md index f32b92d13..502b6c64e 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuity_thesis" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:04:50.355903+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:39.508191+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Industry-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Industry-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9e0fd4278 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Industry-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Darwin Industry" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Industry" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:40.736551+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Darwin Industry refers to historical scholarship about, and the large community of historians of science working on, Charles Darwin's life, work, and influence. The term "has a slightly derogatory connotation, as if the scale of the research has gotten out of control with people cranking out studies on perhaps less and less important aspects of Darwin's work"; but it was originally a self-designation of the scholars who began re-evaluating Darwin and studying his manuscripts and correspondence in the second half of the 20th century. + + +== Darwin's manuscripts and correspondence == +One of the most significant projects of the Darwin Industry has been the systematic publication of all of Darwin's unpublished writings. Two volumes of the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin were published in 1887 along with The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, edited by Francis Darwin; two volumes of More Letters of Charles Darwin were published in 1902. Francis Darwin edited 1909 editions of Darwin's notebooks related to the inception of his theory. Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow pieced together the 1930 Diary of the Beagle from Darwin's unpublished notebooks. A flood of Darwiniana was published in the mid-twentieth century, especially by Darwin's descendants, leading up to the 1959 Darwin Centennial, including an un-redacted edition of Darwin's autobiography edited by Barlow. However, all this made up only a fraction of Darwin's correspondence and other unpublished writings, and much of what was published was incomplete. By the 1990s there were two different versions of The Works of Charles Darwin, an 18 volume edition by AMS Press and a more scholarly 29 volume edition by William Pickering, along with an annotated scholarly volume of Charles Darwin 's Notebooks, 1836-1844. +More significantly, two projects now make most of the primary material relating to Darwin available. Since 1974 the Darwin Correspondence Project has been locating, annotating and publishing the complete surviving correspondence of Darwin, including sixteen volumes (of an expected 30) published between 1985 and 2008 (covering the letters through 1868). An online database makes notes and transcripts of letters available online. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online makes available all of Darwin's print publications, private papers and manuscripts, together with a growing number of supplementary works. Earlier volumes of published letters are included, but it does not duplicate the Correspondence Project publications. It began in 2002 as a pilot website, The writings of Charles Darwin on the web, and in October 2006 it was launched internationally as a new website. It is claimed to be the largest and most widely used Darwin resource ever created. + + +== Biographies == +A substantial number of Darwin biographies were published before the 1959 Darwin Centennial, but from then until the 1990s, the Darwin Industry had produced only a handful of substantial Darwin biographies, several of which had unusual aspects (such as speculations about Darwin's sex life and psychoanalytic interpretations of his illnesses). Much of the biographical work of Darwin scholars was focused on specific instances and historical problems related to Darwin's life (and published as articles or monographs). Since the 1990s, at least three well-received scholarly biographies have been produced: Darwin (1991) by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (with the alternative title Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist when published in America); Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (1996) by Peter J. Bowler; and Janet Browne's two-volume biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). With the 2005 publication of Sandra Herbert's Charles Darwin: Geologist, some scholars are questioning whether this is, or ought to be, the end of the Darwin Industry, since most of Darwin's life and work has been explored so exhaustively; however, Darwin scholars see continuing potential, especially since Darwin's complete manuscripts are not yet published and because "Darwin was exceptional and inspirational". + + +== Darwin-related topics == +The Darwin Industry has also stretched to many related figures before, during and after Darwin's time. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin has been a subject of great interest, and the broad philosophical currents of Naturphilosophie and Romanticism in science during the 19th century are still being explored. Studies of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, Charles Lyell, Thomas Henry Huxley, Richard Owen, Alfred Russel Wallace and many others have all been influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the work of the Darwin Industry. Because of the unusual hybrid nature of The Origin of Species as both a popular and scientific work, one major focus of the Darwin Industry has been the role of popularization and education in the spread of Darwin's theory: the popular work of Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, and most dramatically, Robert Chambers (who wrote the 1844 sensation Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation), is increasingly seen as important in its own right in the history of evolutionary thought. + + +== Notes == + + +== References == +Maura C. Flannery, "The Darwin Industry", The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 68, No. 3 (March 2006), pp. 163–166 +Michael Ruse, "The Darwin Industry: A Guide", Victorian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1996), pp. 217–235 +Timothy Lenoir, "Essay Review: The Darwin Industry", Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 1987), pp. 115–130 +David Oldroyd; Michael Ruse; Paul Pearson; and Sandra Herbert, "Review Symposium: Darwin's Geology: The End of the Darwin Industry?", Metascience, Vol. 16, No. 1 (April 2007), pp. 25–50, doi:10.1007/s11016-006-9069-2. + + +== External links == +Darwin Correspondence Project +The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..37f4115a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "David Bohm" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:05.696760+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +David Joseph Bohm (; 20 December 1917 – 27 October 1992) was an American physicist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Among his many contributions to physics is his causal and deterministic interpretation of quantum theory known as De Broglie–Bohm theory. +Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality—that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact—was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of "implicate" and "explicate" order. He also believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are. Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete. +Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could bridge and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. +Born in the United States, Bohm obtained his Ph.D. under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley. Due to his Communist affiliations, he was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, leading to his suspension from Princeton University and prompting him to leave the U.S. He pursued his career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. + +== Youth and college == +Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to an Austrian Jewish immigrant father, Samuel Bohm, and a Lithuanian Jewish mother, Frieda Popky. He was raised mainly by his father, a furniture-store owner and assistant of the local rabbi. Despite being raised in a Jewish family, he became an agnostic in his teenage years. Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College (now Pennsylvania State University), graduating in 1939, and then the California Institute of Technology, for one year. He then transferred to the theoretical physics group directed by Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, where he obtained his doctorate. +Bohm lived in the same neighborhood as some of Oppenheimer's other graduate students (Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman) and with them became increasingly involved in radical politics. He was active in communist and communist-backed organizations, including the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, and the Committee for Peace Mobilization. During his time at the Radiation Laboratory, Bohm was in a relationship with Betty Friedan and also helped to organize a local chapter of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, a small labor union affiliated to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). + +== Work and doctorate == + +=== Manhattan Project contributions === +During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley's physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos (the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the atom bomb), the project's director, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm's security clearance after seeing evidence of his politics and his close friendship with Weinberg, who had been suspected of espionage. +During the war, Bohm remained at Berkeley, where he taught physics and conducted research in plasma, the synchrotron and the synchrocyclotron. He completed his PhD in 1943 by an unusual circumstance. According to biographer F. David Peat, "The scattering calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!" To satisfy the university, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research. Bohm later performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. These calculations were used for the electromagnetic enrichment of uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. + +=== McCarthyism and leaving the United States === +After the war, Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University. He also worked closely with Albert Einstein at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study. In May 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify because of his previous ties to unionism and suspected communists. Bohm invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify, and he refused to give evidence against his colleagues. +In 1950, Bohm was arrested for refusing to answer the committee's questions. He was acquitted in May 1951, but Princeton had already suspended him. After his acquittal, Bohm's colleagues sought to have him reinstated at Princeton, but Princeton President Harold W. Dodds decided not to renew Bohm's contract. Although Einstein considered appointing him as his research assistant at the institute, IAS President Oppenheimer "opposed the idea and [...] advised his former student to leave the country". His request to go to the University of Manchester received Einstein's support but was unsuccessful. Bohm then left for Brazil to assume a professorship of physics at the University of São Paulo, at Jayme Tiomno's invitation and on the recommendation of both Einstein and Oppenheimer. + +=== Quantum theory and Bohm diffusion === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0064b815a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "David Bohm" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:05.696760+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +During his early period, Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics, particularly quantum mechanics and relativity theory. As a postgraduate at Berkeley, he developed a theory of plasmas, discovering the electron phenomenon known as Bohm diffusion. His first book, Quantum Theory, published in 1951, was well received by Einstein, among others. But Bohm became dissatisfied with the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory he wrote about in that book. Starting from the realization that the WKB approximation of quantum mechanics leads to deterministic equations and convinced that a mere approximation could not turn a probabilistic theory into a deterministic theory, he doubted the inevitability of the conventional approach to quantum mechanics. +Bohm's aim was not to set out a deterministic, mechanical viewpoint but to show that it was possible to attribute properties to an underlying reality, in contrast to the conventional approach. He began to develop his own interpretation (the De Broglie–Bohm theory, also called the pilot wave theory), the predictions of which agreed perfectly with the non-deterministic quantum theory. He initially called his approach a hidden variable theory, but he later called it ontological theory, reflecting his view that a stochastic process underlying the phenomena described by his theory might one day be found. Bohm and his colleague Basil Hiley later stated that they had found their own choice of terms of an "interpretation in terms of hidden variables" to be too restrictive, especially since their variables, position and momentum, "are not actually hidden". +Bohm's work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Stewart Bell's inequality, which rules out local hidden variable theories; the full consequences of Bell's work are still being investigated. + +=== Brazil === +When Bohm arrived in Brazil on 10 October 1951, the US Consul in São Paulo confiscated his passport, informing him he could retrieve it only to return to his country, which reportedly frightened Bohm and significantly lowered his spirits, as he had hoped to travel to Europe. He applied for and received Brazilian citizenship, but by law, had to give up his US citizenship; he was able to reclaim it only decades later, in 1986, after pursuing a lawsuit. +At the University of São Paulo, Bohm worked on the causal theory that became the subject of his publications in 1952. Jean-Pierre Vigier traveled to São Paulo, where he worked with Bohm for three months; Ralph Schiller, student of cosmologist Peter Bergmann, was his assistant for two years; he worked with Tiomno and Walther Schützer; and Mario Bunge stayed to work with him for one year. He was in contact with Brazilian physicists Mário Schenberg, Jean Meyer, Leite Lopes, and had discussions on occasion with visitors to Brazil, including Richard Feynman, Isidor Rabi, Léon Rosenfeld, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Herbert L. Anderson, Donald Kerst, Marcos Moshinsky, Alejandro Medina, and the former assistant to Heisenberg, Guido Beck, who encouraged him in his work and helped him obtain funding. The Brazilian CNPq explicitly supported his work on the causal theory and funded several researchers around Bohm. His work with Vigier was the beginning of a long-standing cooperation between the two and Louis De Broglie, in particular, on connections to the hydrodynamics model proposed by Madelung. +Yet the causal theory met much resistance and skepticism, with many physicists holding the Copenhagen interpretation to be the only viable approach to quantum mechanics. Bohm and Vigier both emphasized causality, not determinism. In this context, Bohm proposed a causal approach in which the material world could be represented at an infinite number of levels, with stochastic dynamics at every level. +From 1951 to 1953, Bohm and David Pines published the articles in which they introduced the random phase approximation and proposed the plasmon. + +=== Bohm and Aharonov form of the EPR paradox === +In 1955, Bohm relocated to Israel, where he spent two years working at the Technion, in Haifa. There, he met Sarah Woolfson, whom he married in 1956. In 1957, Bohm and his student Yakir Aharonov published a new version of the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox, reformulating the original argument in terms of spin. It was that form of the EPR paradox that was discussed by John Stewart Bell in his famous paper of 1964. + +=== Aharonov–Bohm effect === + +In 1957, Bohm relocated to the United Kingdom as a research fellow at the University of Bristol. In 1959, Bohm and Aharonov discovered the Aharonov–Bohm effect, showing how a magnetic field could affect a region of space in which the field had been shielded, but its vector potential did not vanish there. That showed for the first time that the magnetic vector potential, hitherto a mathematical convenience, could have real physical (quantum) effects. +In 1961, Bohm was made professor of theoretical physics at the University of London's Birkbeck College, becoming emeritus in 1987. His collected papers are stored there. + +=== Implicate and explicate order === + +At Birkbeck College, much of the work of Bohm and Basil Hiley expanded on the notion of implicate, explicate, and generative orders proposed by Bohm. In the view of Bohm and Hiley, "things, such as particles, objects, and indeed subjects" exist as "semi-autonomous quasi-local features" of an underlying activity. Such features can be considered to be independent only up to a certain level of approximation in which certain criteria are fulfilled. In that picture, the classical limit for quantum phenomena, in terms of a condition that the action function is not much greater than the Planck constant, indicates one such criterion. They used the word "holomovement" for the activity in such orders. + +=== Holonomic model of the brain === + +In collaboration with Stanford University neuroscientist Karl H. Pribram, Bohm was involved in the early development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain, a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally-accepted ideas. Bohm worked with Pribram on the theory that the brain operates in a manner that is similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..56dee3d4c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "David Bohm" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:05.696760+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Consciousness and thought === +In addition to his scientific work, Bohm was deeply interested in exploring the nature of consciousness, with particular attention to the role of thought as it relates to attention, motivation, and conflict in the individual and in society. Those concerns were a natural extension of his earlier interest in Marxist ideology and Hegelian philosophy. His views were brought into sharper focus through extensive interactions with the philosopher, speaker, and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti, beginning in 1961. Their collaboration lasted a quarter of a century, and their recorded dialogues were published in several volumes. +Bohm's prolonged involvement with the philosophy of Krishnamurti was regarded somewhat skeptically by some of his scientific peers. An examination in 2017 of the relationship between the two men presents it in a more positive light and shows that Bohm's work in the psychological field was complementary to and compatible with his contributions to theoretical physics. +The mature expression of Bohm's views in the psychological field was presented in a seminar conducted in 1990 at the Oak Grove School, founded by Krishnamurti in Ojai, California. It was one of a series of seminars held by Bohm at Oak Grove School, and it was published as Thought as a System. In the seminar, Bohm described the pervasive influence of thought throughout society, including the many erroneous assumptions about the nature of thought and its effects in daily life. +In the seminar, Bohm develops several interrelated themes. He points out that thought is the ubiquitous tool that is used to solve every kind of problem: personal, social, scientific, and so on. Yet thought, he maintains, is also inadvertently the source of many of those problems. He recognizes and acknowledges the irony of the situation: it is as if one gets sick by going to the doctor. +Bohm maintains that thought is a system, in the sense that it is an interconnected network of concepts, ideas and assumptions that pass seamlessly between individuals and throughout society. If there is a fault in the functioning of thought, therefore, it must be a systemic fault, which infects the entire network. The thought that is brought to bear to resolve any given problem, therefore, is susceptible to the same flaw that created the problem it is trying to solve. +Thought proceeds as if it is merely reporting objectively, but in fact, it is often coloring and distorting perception in unexpected ways. What is required in order to correct the distortions introduced by thought, according to Bohm, is a form of proprioception, or self-awareness. Neural receptors throughout the body inform us directly of our physical position and movement, but there is no corresponding awareness of the activity of thought. Such an awareness would represent psychological proprioception and would enable the possibility of perceiving and correcting the unintended consequences of the thinking process. + +=== Further interests === +In his book On Creativity, quoting Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American who developed the field of General Semantics, Bohm expressed the view that "metaphysics is an expression of a world view" and is "thus to be regarded as an art form, resembling poetry in some ways and mathematics in others, rather than as an attempt to say something true about reality as a whole". +Bohm was keenly aware of various ideas outside the scientific mainstream. In his book Science, Order and Creativity, Bohm referred to the views of various biologists on the evolution of the species, including Rupert Sheldrake. He also knew the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. +Contrary to many other scientists, Bohm did not exclude the paranormal out of hand. Bohm temporarily even held Uri Geller's bending of keys and spoons to be possible, prompting warning remarks by his colleague Basil Hiley that it might undermine the scientific credibility of their work in physics. Martin Gardner reported this in a Skeptical Inquirer article and also critiqued the views of Jiddu Krishnamurti, with whom Bohm had met in 1959 and had had many subsequent exchanges. Gardner said that Bohm's view of the interconnectedness of mind and matter "flirted with panpsychism" (on one occasion, Bohm summarized: "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind."). + +=== Bohm dialogue === + +To address societal problems during his later years, Bohm wrote a proposal for a solution that has become known as "Bohm Dialogue", in which equal status and "free space" form the most important prerequisites of communication and the appreciation of differing personal beliefs. An essential ingredient in this form of dialogue is that participants "suspend" immediate action or judgment and give themselves and each other the opportunity to become aware of the thought process itself. Bohm suggested that if the "dialogue groups" were experienced on a sufficiently wide scale, they could help overcome the isolation and fragmentation that Bohm observed in society. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..685b3bd95 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +title: "David Bohm" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:05.696760+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Later life == +Bohm continued his work in quantum physics after his retirement, in 1987. His final work, the posthumously published The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (1993), resulted from a decades-long collaboration with Basil Hiley. He also spoke to audiences across Europe and North America on the importance of dialogue as a form of sociotherapy, a concept he borrowed from London psychiatrist and practitioner of Group Analysis Patrick de Maré, and he had a series of meetings with the Dalai Lama. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990. +Near the end of his life, Bohm began to experience a recurrence of the depression that he had suffered earlier in life. He was admitted to the Maudsley Hospital in South London on 10 May 1991. His condition worsened and it was decided that the only treatment that might help him was electroconvulsive therapy. Bohm's wife consulted psychiatrist David Shainberg, Bohm's longtime friend and collaborator, who agreed that electroconvulsive treatments were probably his only option. Bohm showed improvement from the treatments and was released on 29 August, but his depression returned and was treated with medication. +On the day he died, Bohm said: "You know, it's tantalizing. I feel I'm on the edge of something." +Bohm died after suffering a heart attack in Hendon, London, on 27 October 1992, aged 74. +The film Infinite Potential is based on Bohm's life and studies; it adopts the same name as the biography by F. David Peat. + +== Reception of causal theory == +In the early 1950s, Bohm's causal quantum theory of hidden variables was mostly negatively received, with a widespread tendency among physicists to systematically ignore both Bohm personally and his ideas. There was a significant revival of interest in Bohm's ideas in the late 1950s and the early 1960s; the Ninth Symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol in 1957 was a key turning point toward greater tolerance of his ideas. + +== Publications == +1951. Quantum Theory, New York: Prentice Hall. 1989 reprint, New York: Dover, ISBN 0-486-65969-0 +1957. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, 1961 Harper edition reprinted in 1980 by Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0-8122-1002-6 +1962. Quanta and Reality, A Symposium, with N. R. Hanson and Mary B. Hesse, from a BBC program published by the American Research Council +1965. The Special Theory of Relativity, New York: W.A. Benjamin. +1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-7100-0971-2, 1983 Ark paperback: ISBN 0-7448-0000-5, 2002 paperback: ISBN 0-415-28979-3 +1985. Unfolding Meaning: A weekend of dialogue with David Bohm (Donald Factor, editor), Gloucestershire: Foundation House, ISBN 0-948325-00-3, 1987 Ark paperback: ISBN 0-7448-0064-1, 1996 Routledge paperback: ISBN 0-415-13638-5 +1985. The Ending of Time, with Jiddu Krishnamurti, San Francisco: Harper, ISBN 0-06-064796-5. +1987. Science, Order, and Creativity, with F. David Peat. London: Routledge. 2nd ed. 2000. ISBN 0-415-17182-2. +1989. Meaning And Information, In: P. Pylkkänen (ed.): The Search for Meaning: The New Spirit in Science and Philosophy, Crucible, The Aquarian Press, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85274-061-0. +1991. Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political and Environmental Crises Facing our World (a dialogue of words and images), coauthor Mark Edwards, Harper San Francisco, ISBN 0-06-250072-4 +1992. Thought as a System (transcript of seminar held in Ojai, California, from 30 November to 2 December 1990), London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11980-4. +1993. The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory, with B.J. Hiley, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-12185-X (final work) +1996. On Dialogue. editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, hardcover: ISBN 0-415-14911-8, paperback: ISBN 0-415-14912-6, 2004 edition: ISBN 0-415-33641-4 +1998. On Creativity, editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, hardcover: ISBN 0-415-17395-7, paperback: ISBN 0-415-17396-5, 2004 edition: ISBN 0-415-33640-6 +1999. Limits of Thought: Discussions, with Jiddu Krishnamurti, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-19398-2. +1999. Bohm–Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and Science, with Charles Biederman. editor Paavo Pylkkänen. ISBN 0-415-16225-4. +2002. The Essential David Bohm. editor Lee Nichol. London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-26174-0. preface by the Dalai Lama +2017. David Bohm: Causality and Chance, Letters to Three Women, editor Chris Talbot. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-55491-4. +2018. The Unity of Everything: A Conversation with David Bohm, with Nish Dubashia. Hamburg, Germany: Tredition, ISBN 978-3-7439-9299-3. +2020. David Bohm's Critique of Modern Physics, Letters to Jeffrey Bub, 1966–1969, Foreword by Jeffrey Bub, editor Chris Talbot. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-45536-1. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== Sources == +David Z. Albert (May 1994). "Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics". Scientific American. 270 (5): 58. Bibcode:1994SciAm.270e..58A. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0594-58. +Joye, S.R. (2017). The Little Book of Consciousness: Pribram's Holonomic Brain Theory and Bohm's Implicate Order. The Viola Institute. ISBN 978-0-9988785-4-6. +Greeg Herken (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6589-X. (information on Bohm's work at Berkeley and his dealings with HUAC) +F. David Peat (1997). Infinite Potential: the Life and Times of David Bohm. Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-40635-7. +B.J. Hiley, F. David Peat, ed. (1987). Quantum Implications: Essays in Honour of David Bohm. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06960-2. +David Bohm; Sarah Bohm (1992). Thought as a System. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11980-4. (transcript of seminar held in Ojai, California, from 30 November to 2 December 1990) +Peter R. Holland (2000). The Quantum Theory of Motion: an account of the de Broglie-Bohm Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48543-6. + +== Further reading == +William Keepin: A life of dialogue between science and spirit – David Bohm. In World Scriptures: Leland P. Stewart (ed.): Guidelines for a Unity-and-Diversity Global Civilization, World Scriptures Vol. 2, AuthorHouse. (2009) ISBN 978-1-4389-8086-7, pp. 5–13 +William Keepin: Lifework of David Bohm. River of Truth, Re-vision, vol. 16, no. 1, 1993, p. 32 (online at scribd) + +== External links == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e0a737126 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "David Bohm" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bohm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:05.696760+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The David Bohm Society +The Bohm Krishnamurti Project: Exploring the Legacy of the David Bohm and Jiddu Krishnamurti Relationship +David Bohm's ideas about Dialogue +the David_Bohm_Hub. Includes compilations of David Bohm's life and work in form of texts, audio, video, and pictures +Lifework of David Bohm: River of Truth at the Wayback Machine (archived 25 January 2021): Article by Will Keepin (PDF-version at the Wayback Machine (archived 22 February 2016)) +Interview with David Bohm provided and conducted by F. David Peat along with John Briggs, first issued in Omni magazine, January 1987 +Archive of papers at Birkbeck College relating to David Bohm and David Bohm at the National Archives +David Bohm at the Mathematics Genealogy Project +1979 Audio Interview with David Bohm by Martin Sherwin at Voices of the Manhattan Project +The Bohm Documentary by David Peat and Paul Howard (in production) +The Best David Bohm Interview about "The Nature of Things" by David Suzuki 26 May 1979 +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 8 May 1981, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – interview conducted by Lillian Hoddeson in Edgware, London, England +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 6 June 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session I, interviews conducted by Maurice Wilkins +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 12 June 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session II +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 7 July 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session III +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 25 September 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session IV +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 3 October 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session V +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 22 December 1986, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session VI +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 30 January 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session VII +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 7 February 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session VIII +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 27 February 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session IX +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 6 March 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session X +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 3 April 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session XI +Oral History interview transcript with David Bohm on 16 April 1987, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives – Session XII +Dialectical Materialism and Quantum Physics - The Unpublished 1957 Lectures of David Bohm in Israel \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0d2d94a8f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "David Chalmers" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:06.849858+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University (NYU), as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (along with Ned Block). In 2006, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2013, he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. +Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment. +Chalmers and David Bourget co-founded PhilPapers; a database of journal articles for philosophers. + +== Early life and education == +David Chalmers was born in Sydney, New South Wales, and subsequently grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, where he attended Unley High School. +As a child, he experienced synesthesia. He began coding and playing computer games at the age of 10 on a PDP-10 at a medical center. He also performed exceptionally in mathematics, and secured a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad. When Chalmers was 13, he read Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, which awakened an interest in philosophy. +Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide. After graduating, Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe, before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course. +In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter, writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995. + +== Career == + +In 1994, Chalmers presented a lecture at the inaugural Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, this "lecture established Chalmers as a thinker to be reckoned with and goosed a nascent field into greater prominence." He went on to co-organize the conference (renamed "The Science of Consciousness") for some years with Stuart Hameroff, but stepped away when he felt it became too divergent from mainstream science. Chalmers is a founding member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and one of its past presidents. +Having established his reputation, Chalmers received his first professorship at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. In 1996 he published the widely cited book The Conscious Mind. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and then Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona. In 2004, Chalmers returned to Australia, encouraged by an ARC Federation Fellowship, becoming professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at the Australian National University. Chalmers accepted a part-time professorship at the philosophy department of New York University in 2009, becoming a full-time professor in 2014. +In 2013, Chalmers was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In May 2018, it was announced that he would serve on the jury for the Berggruen Prize. +In 2023, Chalmers won a bet—made in 1998, for a case of wine—with neuroscientist Christof Koch that the neural underpinnings for consciousness would not be resolved by the year 2023, while Koch had bet that they would. + +== Philosophical work == + +=== Philosophy of mind === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b0e1882cf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "David Chalmers" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:06.849858+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Chalmers is best known for formulating what he calls the "hard problem of consciousness," in both his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. He makes a distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports, and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind: physicalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physicalist explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist. Chalmers characterizes his view as "naturalistic dualism": naturalistic because he believes mental states supervene "naturally" on physical systems (such as brains); dualist because he believes mental states are ontologically distinct from and not reducible to physical systems. He has also characterized his view by more traditional formulations such as property dualism. +In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies. These zombies are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone; the facts about them are further facts. Instead, Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back to Leibniz's 1714 "mill" argument; the first substantial use of philosophical "zombie" terminology may be Robert Kirk's 1974 "Zombies vs. Materialists". +After the publication of Chalmers's landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Francisco Varela, Francis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem. John Searle critiqued Chalmers's views in The New York Review of Books. +With Andy Clark, Chalmers has written "The Extended Mind", an article about the borders of the mind. + +According to Chalmers, systems that have the same functional organization "at a fine enough grain" (that are "functionally isomorphic") will have "qualitatively identical conscious experiences". In 1995, he proposed the reductio ad absurdum "fading qualia" thought experiment. It involves progressively replacing each neuron of a brain with a functional equivalent, for example implemented on a silicon chip. Since each substitute neuron performs the same function as the original, the subject would not notice any change. But, Chalmers argues, if qualia (for example, the perceived color of objects) were to fade or disappear, the brain's holder could notice the difference, which would alter the information processing in the brain, leading to a contradiction. He concludes that such fading qualia are impossible in practice, and that after each neuron is replaced, the resulting functionally isomorphic robotic brain would be as conscious as the original biological one. In addition, Chalmers proposed a similar thought experiment, "dancing qualia", which concludes that a robotic brain that is functionally isomorphic to a biological one would not only be as conscious, but would also have the same conscious experiences (e.g., the same perception of color when seeing an object). In 2023, he analyzed whether large language models could be conscious, and suggested that they were probably not conscious, but could become serious candidates for consciousness within a decade. + +=== Philosophy of language === +Chalmers has published works on the "theory of reference" concerning how words secure their referents. He, together with others such as Frank Jackson, played a major role in developing two-dimensional semantics. + +==== Background ==== +Before Saul Kripke delivered his famous lecture series Naming and Necessity in 1970, the descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that a name is an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties. This name secures its reference by a process of properties fitting: whichever object fits the description most, is the referent of the name. Therefore, the description provides the sense of the name, and it is through this sense that the reference of the name is determined. +However, as Kripke argued in Naming and Necessity, a name does not secure its reference via any process of description fitting. Rather, a name determines its reference via a historical-causal link tracing back to the process of naming. And thus, Kripke thinks that a name does not have a sense, or, at least, does not have a sense which is rich enough to play the reference-determining role. Moreover, a name, in Kripke's view, is a rigid designator, which refers to the same object in all possible worlds. Following this line of thought, Kripke suggests that any scientific identity statement such as "Water is H2O" is also a necessary statement, i.e. true in all possible worlds. Kripke thinks that this is a phenomenon that descriptivism cannot explain. +And, as also proposed by Hilary Putnam and Kripke himself, Kripke's view on names can also be applied to the reference of natural kind terms. The kind of theory of reference that is advocated by Kripke and Putnam is called the direct reference theory. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..340bf4ff6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "David Chalmers" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:06.849858+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Two-dimensional semantics ==== +Chalmers disagrees with Kripke, and direct reference theorists in general. He thinks that there are two kinds of intension of a natural kind term, a stance called two-dimensionalism. For example, the statement "Water is H2O" expresses two distinct propositions, often referred to as a primary intension and a secondary intension, which together form its meaning. +The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense, i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent. The primary intension of "water" might be a description, such as "the substance with water-like properties". The entity identified by this intension could vary in different hypothetical worlds. In the twin Earth thought experiment, for example, inhabitants might use "water" to mean their equivalent of water, even if its chemical composition is not H2O. Thus, for that world, "water" does not refer to H2O. +The secondary intension of "water" is whatever "water" refers to in this world. When considered according to its secondary intension, water means H2O in every world. Through this concept, Chalmers provides a way to explain how reference is determined by distinguishing between epistemic possibilities (primary intension) and metaphysical necessities (secondary intension), ensuring that the referent (H2O) is uniquely identified across all metaphysically possible worlds. + +==== Philosophy of verbal disputes ==== +In some more recent work, Chalmers has concentrated on verbal disputes. He argues that a dispute is best characterized as "verbal" when it concerns some sentence S which contains a term T such that (i) the parties to the dispute disagree over the meaning of T, and (ii) the dispute arises solely because of this disagreement. In the same work, Chalmers proposes certain procedures for the resolution of verbal disputes. One of these he calls the "elimination method", which involves eliminating the contentious term and observing whether any dispute remains. + +=== Technology and virtual reality === +Chalmers addressed the issue of virtual and non-virtual worlds in his 2022 book Reality+. While Chalmers recognises that virtual reality is not the same as non-virtual reality, he does not consider virtual reality to be an illusion, but rather a "genuine reality" in its own right. Chalmers sees virtual reality as potentially offering as meaningful a life as non-virtual reality, and argues that we could already be inhabitants of a simulation without knowing it. +Chalmers proposes that computers are forming a form of "exo-cortex", where a part of human cognition is 'outsourced' to corporations such as Apple and Google. +Chalmers was featured in the 2012 documentary film entitled The Singularity by filmmaker Doug Wolens, which focuses on the theory proposed by techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil, of that "point in time when computer intelligence exceeds human intelligence." He was a featured philosopher in the 2020 Daily Nous series on GPT-3, which he described as "one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced." + +== Personal life == +Regarding religion, Chalmers said in 2011: "I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except watered-down humanistic spiritual views. And consciousness is just a fact of life. It's a natural fact of life". +As of 2012 Chalmers was the lead singer of the Zombie Blues band, which performed at the music festival Qualia Fest in 2012 in New York. + +== Bibliography == +The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996). Oxford University Press. hardcover: ISBN 0-19-511789-1, paperback: ISBN 0-19-510553-2 +Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates (1999). Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak and David J. Chalmers (Editors). The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-58181-7 +Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (2002). (Editor). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514581-X or ISBN 0-19-514580-1 +The Character of Consciousness (2010). Oxford University Press. hardcover: ISBN 0-19-531110-8, paperback: ISBN 0-19-531111-6 +Constructing the World (2012). Oxford University Press. hardcover: ISBN 978-0-19-960857-7, paperback: ISBN 978-0199608584 +Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022). W. W. Norton & Company. Hardcover: ISBN 978-0-393-63580-5 + +== Notes == + +== External links == + +Official website +An in-depth autobiographical interview with David Chalmers +"The Singularity" a documentary film featuring Chalmers +The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with David Chalmers +David Chalmers at TED \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Scientific_Biography-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Scientific_Biography-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b9736effb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Scientific_Biography-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +title: "Dictionary of Scientific Biography" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_Scientific_Biography" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:41.896452+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly reference work that was published from 1970 through 1980 by publisher Charles Scribner's Sons, with main editor the science historian Charles Gillispie, from Princeton University. It consisted of sixteen volumes. It is supplemented by the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (2007). Both these publications are included in a later electronic book, called the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. + + +== Dictionary of Scientific Biography == +The Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly English-language reference work consisting of biographies of scientists from antiquity to modern times but excluding scientists who were alive when the Dictionary was first published. It includes scientists who worked in the areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and earth sciences. The work is notable for being one of the most substantial reference works in the field of history of science, containing extensive biographies on hundreds of figures. It gives information about both the personal biography and in considerable detail about the scientific contributions. Engineers, physicians, social scientists and philosophers only appeared "when their work was intrinsically related to the sciences of nature or to mathematics." Though the Dictionary has worldwide coverage, the editors write that it focuses most on Western scientists, due to the limited availability of scholarship about Asian, Indian and Islamic historical scientists at the time. +The articles in the Dictionary are typically 1–5 pages and are written by eminent historians of science. All articles list a selection of the original works of the subject, as well as a comprehensive list of the secondary literature about them (which may be in any language), including early works as well as more contemporary ones. +The first volume of the Dictionary was first put out in 1970, under the general editorship of Charles Coulston Gillispie. Charles Scribner Jr., the head of Charles Scribner's Sons, initiated the discussions with Gillispie and took a special interest in it. The set was completed in 1980. The Dictionary was published in 16 volumes under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies by Charles Scribner's Sons with support from the National Science Foundation. Volume 15 is Supplement I; it contains additional biographies as well as topical essays on non-Western scientific traditions. Volume 16 is the general index. A 2-volume Supplement II with additional biographies was published in 1990. +In 1981, after the 16-volume set was complete, Scribner's published a one-volume abridgment, the Concise Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Its second edition was published in 2001 and includes content from the 1990 Supplement II. +In 1981, the American Library Association awarded the Dartmouth Medal to the Dictionary as a reference work of outstanding quality and significance. +In 1975, three chapters from the Dictionary of Scientific Biography were expanded and published individually in Scribner's DSB Editions series: + +I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin: Scientist and Statesman. ISBN 0-684-14251-1 +Francis Everitt, James Clerk Maxwell: Physicist and Natural Philosopher. ISBN 0-684-14253-8 +Henry Guerlac, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: Chemist and Revolutionary. ISBN 0-684-14222-8 + + +== New Dictionary of Scientific Biography == +The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, edited by Noretta Koertge, was published by Scribner's in December 2007 with 775 entries. Nearly 500 of these are new articles about scientists who died after 1980 and thus were not included in the original Dictionary; 75 articles are on figures from earlier periods not included in the original Dictionary of Scientific Biography, including a substantial number of female and third-world scientific figures. + + +== Electronic version == +In 2007, Charles Scribner's Sons published the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography as an e-book. It includes the complete text of both print editions, with a unified index and other finding aids. The e-book version is available as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library. + + +== Critical reception == +The DSB has been widely praised as a monumental undertaking. One reviewer of another work wrote that "The Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB) has become the standard against which to measure all multi-volume biographical works in history of science." A few have noted major omissions as being a problem. Additionally, two major historians of science were omitted among the contributors, Joseph Needham and Otto Neugebauer. According to Donald Fleming, the worst account was that of J.D. Bernal by C.P. Snow, while Joseph Needham found it the most brilliant entry. According to Fernando Q. Gouvêa, the 2008 Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, despite some significant problems, "remains an essential resource for those interested in the lives of scientists." + + +== Editions == +Gillispie, Charles C., editor in chief. Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970–1980. 16 vols. ISBN 0-684-10114-9. Supplement II, edited by Frederic Lawrence Holmes, 2 vols., 1990. ISBN 978-0-684-16962-0 OCLC 89822 (set). +Concise Dictionary of Scientific Biography. American Council of Learned Societies. New York Scribner, 1981. ISBN 0-684-16650-X. +Koertge, Noretta, editor in chief. New Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007. 8 vols. ISBN 978-0-684-31320-7. +Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2007 [e-book]. ISBN 978-0-684-31559-1. + + +== Reviews == +Barzun, J. (1970-11-06). "Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Ed. Vol. 1, Pierre Abailard-L. S. Berg; xiv, 626 pp., illus. Vol. 2, Hans Berger-Christoph Buys Ballot; xii, 628 pp. Scribner, New York, 1970. $35 a volume". Science. 170 (3958). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): 615–616. doi:10.1126/science.170.3958.615. ISSN 0036-8075. JSTOR 1731508. +Krupp, E. C. (1985). "Prisoner in Disguise – A Review of: Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume XV, Supplement I". Archaeoastronomy. 8: 142. Bibcode:1985Arch....8..142K. +Brush, Stephen G. (1972). Gillispie, Charles Coulston (ed.). "BOOK AND FILM REVIEWS: A Facinating [sic] Reference: Dictionary of Scientific Biography". The Physics Teacher. 10 (3). American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT): 158. doi:10.1119/1.2352143. ISSN 0031-921X. +I. Bernard Cohen (1970). "Dictionary of Scientific Biography". The New York Times. + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Some sample DSB entries, digitized by Cultural Heritage Language Technologies and the Linda Hall Library +Introduction to the New DSB from Indiana University \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fbcbe4153 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Earth System Science Partnership" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_System_Science_Partnership" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:30.110860+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) was an international interdisciplinary partnership established to promote integrated study of the Earth system and the interactions between environmental and human processes. The partnership brought together four major global change programmes: DIVERSITAS, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP). + + +== Purpose and scope == +ESSP aimed to transcend disciplinary boundaries by integrating natural sciences and social sciences to improve understanding and prediction of global and regional environmental change, and to inform sustainable responses. Its strategy emphasised systems-level observations, interdisciplinary modelling, regional studies, and engagement with stakeholders and policy communities. + + +== Joint projects and activities == +ESSP coordinated a small set of interdisciplinary “Joint Projects” addressing societally relevant themes: carbon (through the Global Carbon Project), food systems (GECAFS), water systems (GWSP), and global environmental change and human health (GEC&HH). These projects combined existing scientific networks, regional studies (for example the Monsoon Asia Integrated Regional Study, MAIRS), and capacity-building activities to link local-regional research with global synthesis. + + +== Governance and review == +ESSP operated as a partnership among the sponsoring programmes with coordination provided through a scientific committee and Secretariat functions, and it was periodically reviewed by ICSU and partner funding bodies to assess progress, governance and policy relevance. + + +== Transition and legacy == +Following an independent review and planning processes, ESSP underwent a phased transition into the initiative known as Future Earth which formally began to absorb and reconfigure ESSP activities from 2012 onwards; this shift sought a broader sustainability focus and new modes of co-design between science and society. ESSP’s principal legacy is the operational model of interdisciplinary joint projects and regional synthesis, which informed successor efforts and many active research networks. + + +== See also == +Earth system science +International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme +Systems geology + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Earth System Science Partnership begins transition to Future Earth +Future Earth Initiative Archived 2016-12-02 at the Wayback Machine \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_scientific_knowledge-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_scientific_knowledge-0.md index f8b8de5f3..03d20fd87 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_scientific_knowledge-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_scientific_knowledge-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_scientific_knowledge" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:11:19.132749+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:43.116598+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9caa235f5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Einstein Papers Project" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:45.446220+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Einstein Papers Project (EPP) produces the historical edition of the writings and correspondence of Albert Einstein. The EPP collects, transcribes, translates, annotates, and publishes materials from Einstein's literary estate and a multitude of other repositories, which hold Einstein-related historical sources. The staff of the project is an international collaborative group of scholars, editors, researchers, and administrators working on the ongoing authoritative edition The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (CPAE). + +== Significance == +According to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, + +"The Albert Einstein Archives is an extraordinary cultural asset of universal importance for humanity and of national importance for Israel and the Jewish people. Representing the intellectual and personal record of a creative genius whose thinking profoundly changed our perception of the universe, it is of inestimable value. Einstein did not wish that any physical monument or memorial be erected in his name. The preservation of his papers, which most authentically reflect his ideas and person, affords a far more fitting means of maintaining his legacy." + +== Foundation == +The EPP was established by Princeton University Press (PUP) in 1977 at the Institute for Advanced Study. The founding editor of the project was professor of physics John Stachel. In 1984, the project moved from Princeton to Stachel's home institution, Boston University. The first volume of the CPAE was published by PUP in 1987. The following year, historian of science Martin J. Klein of Yale University was appointed senior editor of the project. Volumes 1-6 and 8 of the series were completed during the project's time in Boston. +In 2000, professor of history Diana Kormos-Buchwald was appointed general editor and director of the EPP and established offices for the project at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) In Pasadena, California. Volumes 7 and 9-16 of the CPAE have been completed since the project's move to Caltech. (Volume 11 in the series is a comprehensive index and bibliography to Volumes 1–10). +The CPAE volumes include Einstein's books, his published and unpublished scientific and non-scientific articles, his lecture and research notebooks, travel diaries, book reviews, appeals, and reliable records of his lectures, speeches, interviews with the press, and other oral statements. The volumes also include his professional, personal, and political correspondence. +Each annotated volume, referred to as the documentary edition, presents full text documents in their original language, primarily German. Introductions, endnotes, texts selected for inclusion as abstracts, etc. are in English. Volume 16 of the CPAE is the most recent publication in the series; the first sixteen volumes cover Einstein's life up to May 1929. PUP publishes the series. With each documentary edition, the EPP simultaneously publishes a companion English translation volume. +The EPP collaborates with the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his last will and testament, Einstein bequeathed his literary estate and his personal papers to the Hebrew University. The project and the archives maintain and update a shared archival database of 90,000+ records. Support for the project comes from PUP, endowments from individuals and universities, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. + + Originally free, the project will now be under some pricing model. + +== 2014–2025: The Digital Einstein Papers == +In late 2014, the EPP and PUP announced the launch of The Digital Einstein papers project, a free (open-access) site for The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, +According to EPP Chairman Buchwald, the site would, + +"... introduce current and future generations to important ideas and moments in history, ... ' It is exciting to think that thanks to the careful application of new technology, this work will now reach a much broader audience and stand as the authoritative digital source for Einstein’s written legacy. ' ” +The site presented the complete contents of volumes 1–16 and would add subsequent volumes in the series roughly two years after original book publication. The project volumes were reproduced online as fully searchable PDFs of the printed volumes, with all documents and endnotes linked to provide seamless transitions between the original language documentary edition and English translations. Subsequent volumes would be added to the website approximately eighteen months after their release in print. It was projected that there would be thirty volumes in the series. Eventually, the Digital Einstein Papers website would provide access to all of Einstein's writings and correspondence accompanied by scholarly annotation and apparatus. +The launch of The Digital Einstein Papers attracted broad attention in the press, with coverage ranging from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal. +The Digital Einstein project was supported by the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. endowment, the California Institute of Technology, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Arcadia Fund. +In 2025, a line of text along the top of important pages on the site announced that access to the free "Digital Einstein" site would end on 15 August 2025. + +== 2026–present: Einstein Portal == +The replacement, currently referred to variously as the Einstein Portal and the Einstein database will be a new site developed with Paradigm Publishing Services, based on De Gruyter Brill database technology, and with improved LATEX search features. +The new website is expected to appear at around "the back end of 2026" and will be paywalled, with organisations invited to apply for a custom price quote for giving their members access. It will have no open-access content, despite the fact that (since Einstein died in 1955), many important Einstein texts might be expected to be in the public domain by 2026 under the common "Life plus 70 years" copyright rule. +Initially, the site will allow access to the same sixteen volumes as the defunct "Digital Einstein" site, and is still planned to eventually be expanded to 30 volumes. Due to the amount of additional third-party material now amassed by the project, completion of all volumes up to 1955 is currently anticipated to take "still several decades". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b3aa3ea93 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,109 @@ +--- +title: "Einstein Papers Project" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:45.446220+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Volumes == +The Early Years: 1879-1902 is the first volume in the series. +The Swiss Years: 1900-1914 and The Berlin Years: 1914-1930 followed through volume 17 in two parallel and extensively cross-referenced branches: +Writings: published and previously unpublished articles, lecture notes, research notes, accounts of his lectures, speeches, interviews, book reviews, etc. +Correspondence: letters, travel diaries, calendars, documents about Einstein by third parties, etc. + +== The early years: 1879–1902 == + +=== Volume 1 - Collected Papers 1879-1902 === +Includes many previously unpublished documents, e.g. class notes for Heinrich Friedrich Weber's lectures on thermodynamics and electromagnetism during Einstein's second year at ETH Zurich, etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 1, The Early Years: 1879-1902. +Editors: John Stachel et al. ISBN 0-691-08407-6, 1987. + +== The Swiss years: 1900–1914 == + +=== Volume 2 - Writings 1900-1909 === +Includes Einstein's first (1900) published paper after his graduation from ETH Zurich, the Annus Mirabilis Papers, text of his invited lecture after his first academic appointment to the University of Zurich, etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2, The Swiss Years: Writings, 1900-1909. +Editors: John Stachel et al. ISBN 0-691-08526-9, 1989. + +=== Volume 3 - Writings 1909-1911 === +Includes Einstein's report to the first Solvay Conference, his appointment to the Charles University in Prague, his paper calculating gravitational bending of light, previously unpublished lecture notes, etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 3, The Swiss Years: Writings, 1909-1911. +Editors: Martin J. Klein et al. ISBN 0-691-08772-5, 1993. + +=== Volume 4 - Writings 1912-1914 === +Includes a previously unpublished manuscript on relativity and electrodynamics, a notebook documenting his preparation for his first joint paper (1913, with Marcel Grossmann), previously unknown calculations with Michele Besso on the motion of the perihelion of Mercury, etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 4, The Swiss Years: Writings, 1912-1914. +Editors: Martin J. Klein et al. ISBN 0-691-03705-1, 1995. + +=== Volume 5 - Correspondence 1902-1914 === +Includes more than five hundred previously unpublished letters to and from Einstein in his early adulthood, from his first employment at the Swiss patent office in 1902 through his appointment to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1914. Correspondents included Max von Laue, Paul Ehrenfest, Alfred Kleiner, Fritz Haber, Walther Nernst, etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 5, The Swiss Years: Correspondence, 1902-1914. +Editors: Martin J. Klein et al. ISBN 0-691-03322-6, 1993. + +== The Berlin years: 1914–1930 == + +=== Volume 6 - Writings 1914-1917 === +Includes papers describing Einstein's only experimental physics investigation, a study of André-Marie Ampère's molecular current theory of electromagnetism with Wander Johannes de Haas; etc. + +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 6, The Berlin Years: Writings, 1914-1917. +Editors: A. J. Kox et al. ISBN 0-691-01086-2, 1996. + +=== Volume 7 - Writings 1918-1921 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 7, The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921. +Editors: Michel Janssen et al. ISBN 0-691-05717-6, 2002. + +=== Volume 8 - Correspondence 1914-1918 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 8, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918. +Editors: R. Schulmann et al. In two volumes. ISBN 0-691-04849-5, 1997. + +=== Volume 9 - Correspondence January 1919-April 1920 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 9, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January 1919 - April 1920. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 0-691-12088-9, 2004. + +=== Volume 10 - Correspondence May–December 1920, Supplementary Correspondence 1909-1920 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 10, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, May–December 1920, and Supplementary Correspondence, 1909-1920. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 0-691-12825-1, 2006. + +=== Volume 11 - Cumulative Index, Bibliography, List of Correspondence, Chronology, and Errata to Volumes 1 - 10 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 11, Cumulative Index, Bibliography, List of Correspondence, Chronology, and Errata to Volumes 1 - 10. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 978-0-691-14187-9, 2009. + +=== Volume 12 - The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January - December 1921 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 12, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, January - December 1921. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 9780691141909, 2009. + +=== Volume 13 - The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, January 1922 - March 1923 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 13, The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, January 1922 - March 1923. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 9780691156743, 2012. + +=== Volume 14 - The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, April 1923 - May 1925 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 14, The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, April 1923 - May 1925. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 978-0691164106, 2015. + +=== Volume 15 - The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1925 - May 1927 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 15, The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1925 - May 1927. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 978-0691178813, 2018. + +=== Volume 16 - The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1927 - May 1929 === +The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 16, The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1927 - May 1929. +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald et al. ISBN 9780691216812, 2021. + +=== Volume 17 - The Berlin Years: Writings & Correspondence, June 1929 - November 1930 === +Editors: Diana Kormos-Buchwald. ISBN 9780691246178, 2024. + +== Trustees == +The trustees of Einstein's literary estate were: + +Otto Nathan: executor and co-trustee, professor of economics, author and friend. +Helen Dukas: co-trustee, Einstein's secretary for nearly thirty years. + +== Editors == +The editors of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein were: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d4d0b090a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +title: "Einstein Papers Project" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Papers_Project" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:45.446220+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +John Stachel: First editor, volumes 1, 2 +Martin J. Klein: Editor, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6 +Robert Schulmann: Editor, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; associate editor, volumes 1, 2 +A. J. Kox: Editor, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 15, 16; associate editor, volumes 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 +Tilman Sauer: Editor, volumes 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16; contributing editor, volume 4 +Jürgen Renn: Editor, volumes 3, 4; assistant editor, volumes 1, 2 +Michel Janssen: Editor, volumes 7, 8 +Christoph Lehner: Editor, volume 7 +Virginia Iris Holmes: Editor, volumes 10, 12 +Osik Moses: Editor, volumes 11, 14; associate editor, volumes 12, 13 +Dennis Lehmkuhl: Editor, volumes 15, 16; associate editor, volumes 13, 14 +Issachar Unna, associate editor, volumes 13, 14, 15 +József Illy: Editor, volumes 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16; contributing editor, volumes 4, 6 +Daniel J. Kennefick: Editor, volumes 9, 16; associate editor, volumes 7, 10, 12, 13, 15 +Current editors of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein are: + +Diana Kormos-Buchwald: director and general editor, Robert M. Abbey Professor of History at Caltech. A historian of modern physical science. +Ze'ev Rosenkranz: senior editor and assistant director, past curator of the Albert Einstein Archives, Jerusalem. +Emily de Araújo: assistant editor and public relations administrator. +Rudy Hirschmann: IT manager. +Jennifer Nollar James: associate editor. + +== Executive committee == +The current executive committee members of the project are: + +Yemima Ben Menahem: Professor, Department of Philosophy (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) +Michael Gordin: Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and Director, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (Princeton University) +John L. Heilbron: Visiting Associate in History, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (California Institute of Technology) +Daniel J. Kevles: Professor Emeritus, Department of History (Yale University) +John D. Norton: Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh) +Barbara Oberg: Professor, Department of History (Princeton University) +Moshe Sluhovsky: Professor and chair, Department of History, Vigevani Chair in European Studies (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) +Joseph H. Taylor: Professor Emeritus, Department of Physics (Princeton University) +Kip S. Thorne: Professor Emeritus, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (California Institute of Technology) +Sean Wilentz: Professor, Department of History (Princeton University) + +== See also == +Albert Einstein Archives +List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein + +== References == + +== External links == +The Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology. +Forthcoming Einstein Portal co-managed by Einstein Papers Project with Princeton University and De Gruyter. +The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in Post-War America (Project of the Oregon State University) +Overbye, Dennis (20 May 2003). "Now on the Web, a Peek Into Einstein's Thoughts". The New York Times. +Kozlowski, Carl (16 July 2009). "Dear Albert: Caltech's Einstein Papers Project unveils another volume filled with the great man's private correspondence". Pasadena Weekly. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 17 January 2011. +Overbye, Dennis (4 December 2014). "Thousands of Einstein Documents Are Now a Click Away". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 December 2014. +Hirschmann, Rudolf (September 2011) "After the Prize: Indexing at the Einstein Papers Project". The Indexer, Volume 29, No. 3. +Dietrich, Jane S. (2000) "Einstein Redux". Engineering and Science, No. 3. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures-0.md index 4e6146e5b..cc6a5c7fd 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopaedia_of_the_History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_in_Non-Western_Cultures" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:28:50.162386+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:56.659181+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endophysics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endophysics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..19bfee692 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endophysics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Endophysics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endophysics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:09.182403+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The term endophysics (lit. “physics from within”) was coined by the American physicist David Finkelstein in a letter to the German biochemist Otto E. Rössler, who originally came up with the concept. It refers to the study of how observations are affected and limited by the observer being within the universe. This is in contrast with "exophysics," which assumes a system observed from the “outside”. + + +== See also == +Physics +Internal measurement (This notion is very similar to endophysics.) + + +== References == + +R. J. Boskovich, De spacio et tempore, ut a nobis cognoscuntur, partial English translation in: J. M. Child (Ed.), A Theory of Natural Philosophy, Open Court (1922) and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1966, pp. 203–205. +T. Toffoli, The role of the observer in uniform systems, in: G. J. Klir (Ed.), Applied General Systems Research, Recent Developments and Trends, Plenum Press, New York, London, 1978, pp. 395–400. +K. Svozil, Connections between deviations from Lorentz transformation and relativistic energy-momentum relation, Europhysics Letters 2 (1986) 83–85. +O. E. Rössler, Endophysics, in: J. L. Casti, A. Karlquist (Eds.), Real Brains, Artificial Minds, North-Holland, New York, 1987, p. 25. +O. E. Rössler, Endophysics. Die Welt des inneren Beobachters, Merwe Verlag, Berlin, 1992, with a foreword by Peter Weibel. +K. Svozil, Extrinsic-intrinsic concept and complementarity, in: H. Atmanspacker, G. J. Dalenoort (Eds.), Inside versus Outside, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1994, pp. 273–288. + + +== Further reading == +Saniga, Metod; Buccheri, Rosolino; Elitzur, Avshalom C. (3 October 2005). Endophysics, Time, Quantum And The Subjective - Proceedings Of The Zif Interdisciplinary Research Workshop (With Cd-rom). World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-4479-29-5. Retrieved 16 May 2024. + + +== External links == +Karl Svozil (2005). Computational universes. doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2004.11.055 +Interview with O. E. Rössler (in German) Vom Chaos, der Virtuellen Realität und der Endophysik \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_Letters-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_Letters-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..84eadeb90 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_Letters-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Epistemological Letters" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_Letters" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:10.373743+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Epistemological Letters (French: Lettres Épistémologiques) was a hand-typed, mimeographed "underground" newsletter about quantum physics that was distributed to a private mailing list, described by the physicist and Nobel laureate John Clauser as a "quantum subculture", between 1973 and 1984. +Distributed by a Swiss foundation, the newsletter was created because mainstream academic journals were reluctant to publish articles about the philosophy of quantum mechanics, especially anything that implied support for ideas such as action at a distance. Thirty-six or thirty-seven issues of Epistemological Letters appeared, each between four and eighty-nine pages long. Several well-known scientists published their work there, including the physicist John Bell, the originator of Bell's theorem. According to John Clauser, much of the early work on Bell's theorem was published only in Epistemological Letters. + + +== Interpretations of quantum physics == + +According to the Irish physicist Andrew Whitaker, a powerful group of physicists centred on Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg made clear that "there was no place in physics – no jobs in physics! – for anybody who dared to question the Copenhagen interpretation" (Bohr's interpretation) of quantum theory. John Clauser writes that any inquiry into the "wonders and peculiarities" of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement that went outside the "party line" was prohibited, in what he argues amounted to an "evangelical crusade". Samuel Goudsmit, editor of the prestigious Physical Review and Physical Review Letters until he retired in 1974, imposed a formal ban on the philosophical debate, issuing instructions to referees that they should feel free to reject material that even hinted at it. + + +== Alternative publications == +Articles questioning the mainstream position were therefore distributed in alternative publications, and Epistemological Letters became one of the main conduits. The newsletter was sent out by the +L'Institut de la Méthode of the Association Ferdinand Gonseth, which had been established in honour of the philosopher Ferdinand Gonseth. The newsletter described itself as "an open and informal journal allowing confrontation and ripening of ideas before publishing in some adequate journal." According to Clauser, it announced that the usual stigma against discussing certain ideas, such as hidden-variable theories, was to be absent. The newsletter's editors included Abner Shimony. +Several eminent physicists published their material in Epistemological Letters, including John Bell, the originator of Bell's theorem. Clauser writes that much of the early work on Bell's theorem was published only in Epistemological Letters. Bell's paper, "The Theory of Local Beables" (beable, as opposed to observable, referring to something that exists independently of any observer), appeared there in March 1976. Abner Shimony, John Clauser and Michael Horne published responses to it, also in the Letters. Henry Stapp was another prominent physicist who wrote for the Letters. H. Dieter Zeh published a paper in the Letters on the many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1981. + + +== Digitization of the Epistemological Letters == +Don Howard, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was a Ph.D. student of Abner Shimony, one of the editors of the newsletter; as such, he had an almost complete set. In collaboration with Sebastian Murgueitio Ramirez (then his graduate student, now assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue University), the set was completed and digitized in 2018–2019, in order to make this very rare document available to the community of historians and philosophers of physics. The entire set is available to the public at the Epistemological Letters digital archive, and the original newsletter is in Special Collections at the University Library. + + +== See also == +Fundamental Fysiks Group +Physics Physique Физика + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Friere, Olival (2003). "A Story Without an Ending: The Quantum Physics Controversy 1950–1970", Science & Education, 12, pp. 573–586. +Gusterson, Hugh (18 August 2011). "Physics: Quantum outsiders", Nature, 476, pp. 278–279. +"Epistemological Letters", digital archive at the University of Notre Dame. + + +== External links == +Index to the Letters at Information Philosopher \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_László-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_László-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0b53755f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_László-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,95 @@ +--- +title: "Ervin László" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_László" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:17.472647+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Ervin László (Hungarian: [ˈɛrvin ˈlaːsloː]; born 12 June 1932) is an American philosopher of science, systems theorist, integral theorist, originally a classical pianist. He is an advocate of the theory of quantum consciousness. + + +== Early life, family and education == + +László was born in Budapest, Hungary. His father was a shoe manufacturer, and his mother played the piano. +László started playing the piano when he was five years old. His first piano concert was with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra when he was nine years old. +After World War II, László relocated to the US. + + +== Career == +László is a visiting faculty member at the Graduate Institute Bethany. He has published about 75 books and over 400 papers, and is editor of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution. +László participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2006. In 2010, he was elected an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. +In Hungary, the minister of environment appointed Laszlo as one of the leaders of the ministry's campaign concerning global warming. + + +== Awards and honors == +In 2002, László received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pécs. + + +== Personal life == +László married Carita Jägerhorn af Spurila 16 November 1956. One of their two sons is Alexander Laszlo. + + +== Work == + + +=== Systems theory === +László became a leading exponent of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory. László viewed systems theory not only as scientifically important; he also saw in it the potential to establish an objective basis for humanist values, deriving from a consideration of a natural systems hierarchy and its evolution. In his opinion, “The ethics and natural philosophy of this new world view can help explicate and justify an emerging supranational social ethos: ‘reverence for natural systems’.” + + +=== General Evolutionary Research Group === +In 1984, László was co-founder with Béla H. Bánáthy, Riane Eisler, John Corliss, Francisco Varela, Vilmos Csanyi, Gyorgy Kampis, David Loye, Jonathan Schull and Eric Chaisson of the initially secret General Evolutionary Research Group. Meeting behind the Iron Curtain, the group of scientists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines met in secret. Their goal was to explore whether it might be possible to use the chaos theory to identify a new general theory of evolution that might serve as a path to a better world. + + +=== Club of Budapest === +In 1993, in response to his experience with the Club of Rome, he founded the Club of Budapest to, in his words, "centre attention on the evolution of human values and consciousness as the crucial factors in changing course — from a race towards degradation, polarization and disaster to a rethinking of values and priorities so as to navigate today's transformation in the direction of humanism, ethics and global sustainability". + + +=== Akashic field theory === +László's 2004 book, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything posits a field of information as the substance of the cosmos. Using the Sanskrit and Vedic term for "space", Akasha, he calls this information field the "Akashic field" or "A-field". He posits that the "quantum vacuum" (see Vacuum state) is the fundamental energy and information-carrying field that informs not just the current universe, but all universes past and present (collectively, the Akashic records or "Metaverse"). +László believes that such an informational field can explain why our universe appears to be fine-tuned so as to form galaxies and conscious lifeforms; and why evolution is an informed, not random, process. He believes that the hypothesis solves several problems that emerge from quantum physics, especially nonlocality and quantum entanglement. + + +=== The Immortal Mind === +László became interested in the consciousness theories of Anthony Peake, (who in turn was an admirer of László’s work on the Akashic Field). Peake, whose background was in the social sciences, had sought to explain the fact that altered states of consciousness (such as deja vu, dreams, psychedelic drug experiences, meditation, near death experience) sometimes seem to feature precognition and premonitions. Peake had produced a tentative synthesis of the ancient idea of the "Eternal Return" with modern ideas like the simulation argument, the holographic universe, and the many worlds interpretation. In Peake’s hypothesis, one lives variants of the same life repeatedly but with the ability to make different choices and experience different outcomes, and a premonition is in fact a memory of the past. Peake became a Consciousness Studies Department Member at Ervin László’s Center For Advanced Studies. László collaborated with Anthony Peake on the book The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain. + + +=== Macroshift theory === +In his book You Can Change the World, László promotes a linking of non-government organizations promoting sustainable development, using the Internet. + + +=== Autobiography === +László has written an autobiography entitled Simply Genius! And Other Tales from My Life, published by Hay House Publishers in June 2011. + + +== Reception == +In an essay, Stanislav Grof compared László's work to that of Ken Wilber, saying "Where Wilber outlined what an integral theory of everything should look like, Laszlo actually created one." + + +== Selected publications == +Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought, Gordon and Breach, 1972; Harper Torchbooks, 1973. +The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time, Hampton Press, 1996. +The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science, Element Books, Ltd., 1996. +Evolution: The General Theory, Hampton Press, 1996. +Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World, Berrett - Koehler, 2001 +The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness, State University of New York Press, 2003. +You Can Change the World: The Global Citizen's Handbook for Living on Planet Earth: A Report of the Club of Budapest, Select Books, 2003. +Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, Inner Traditions International, 2004. +Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos : The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality, Inner Traditions, 2006. +The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, Hampton Roads, 2006. +Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and our World, Inner Traditions, 2008. +WorldShift 2012: Making Green Business New Politics & Higher Consciousness Work Together, McArthur & Company, 2009. +The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness Beyond the Brain, with Anthony Peake, Simon and Schuster, 2014. +The Intelligence of the Cosmos, Inner Traditions, 2017. +Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How It Can Transform the World, St. Martin's Essentials, 2020. + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +ervinlaszlo.com - The personal site of Ervin Laszlo +The Life and Career of Dr. Ervin Laszlo interviewed by David William Gibbons December 2011 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_system-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_system-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0833a5c11 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_system-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Experimental system" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_system" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:46.582343+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In scientific research, an experimental system is the physical, technical and procedural basis for an experiment or series of experiments. Historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger defines an experimental system as: "A basic unit of experimental activity combining local, technical, instrumental, institutional, social, and epistemic aspects." Scientists (particularly laboratory biologists) and historians and philosophers of biology have pointed to the development and spread of successful experimental systems, such as those based on popular model organism or scientific apparatus, as key elements in the history of science, particularly since the early 20th century. The choice of an appropriate experimental system is often seen as critical for a scientist's long-term success, as experimental systems can be very productive for some kinds of questions and less productive for others, acquiring a sort of momentum that takes research in unpredicted directions. +A successful experimental system must be stable and reproducible enough for scientists to make sense of the system's behavior, but variable and unpredictable enough that it can produce useful results. In many cases, a well-understood experimental system can be "black-boxed" as a standard technique, which can then be a component of other experimental systems. Rheinberger divides experimental systems into two parts: the part under investigation ("epistemic things") and the well-understood part that provides a stable context for experimentation ("technical objects"). +The development of experimental systems in biology often requires the "domestication" of a particular organism for the laboratory environment, including the creation of relatively homogeneous lines or strains and the tailoring of conditions to highlight the variable aspects that scientists are interested in. Scientific technologies, similarly, often require the development of a full experimental system to go from a viable concept to a technique that works in practice on a usefully consistent basis. For example, the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is generally attributed to Kary Mullis, who came up with the concept in 1983, but the process of development of PCR into the revolutionary technology it became by the early 1990s took years of work by others at Cetus Corporation—and the basic components of the system had been known since the 1960s DNA synthesis work of Har Gobind Khorana—making "who invented PCR?" a complicated question. + + +== Notes == + + +== References == +Robert E. Kohler. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-45063-5 +Paul Rabinow. Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN 0-226-70146-8 +Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8047-2785-6 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9dbd80c0a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Fatal Misconception" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Misconception" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:59.078583+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population is a 2008 book by Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University. +Efforts to control population have been controversial, and Connelly argues that "the road to controlling population growth in the 20th century was paved with good intentions and unpleasant policies that did not work". For example, millions of intrauterine contraceptive devices were exported to poor countries although they were known to cause infections and sterility. + + +== Reception == + + +=== Book reviews === +Nicholas Kristof reviewed the book favorably for The New York Times, but concluded: "It's certainly fair of Connelly to dredge up the forced sterilizations, the casual disregard for injuries caused by IUDs, the racism and sexism and all the rest — but we also need to remember that all that is history. The family planning movement has corrected itself, and today it saves the lives of women in poor countries and is central to efforts to reduce poverty worldwide. If we allow that past to tarnish today's efforts by family planning organizations, women in poor countries will be doubly hurt." +Reihan Salam reviewed the book for the New York Sun, where he raised some cautionary points. +James Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) reviewed the book for Times Higher Education. Hughes concluded: "Connelly's pessimism that international institutions can ever be as accountable as national governments is hopefully unwarranted. It seems likely that transnational bodies will be increasingly important in ensuring the health and wellbeing of the nine or ten billion people the planet will soon hold." +Helen Epstein reviewed the book favorably for the New York Review of Books, concluding: "The population control movement was a small part of US foreign policy, but its history reminds us of the point American policymakers keep missing: universal human rights are not a luxury. They are themselves the goals we should be seeking." +Diana Wyndham reviewed the book for the Australian Review of Public Affairs, concluding: "Connelly's apparent balance—he opposes both pro- and anti-population control excesses—means he is more likely to reach and convince a broader audience to accept his argument that global population control services are bad and should cease. A major worry is that this book's catalogue of failed population control programs will be used by 'Pro-life' groups who want to reinstate the 1984 Mexico City policy ban which, by denying aid, spread sexually transmitted diseases and increased pregnancy-related deaths. If, as he believes, 'the heroic age of population control is over' (p. 16), life on this planet will end because there is only a finite supply of water, food and natural resources. There is wisdom in the family planning slogan: 'Hope is not a method'." + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2d2093121 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Federico Faggin" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:11.564117+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Federico Faggin (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko fadˈdʒin], Venetian: [faˈdʒiŋ]; born 1 December 1941) is an Italian-American physicist, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur. He is best known for designing the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004. He led the 4004 (MCS-4) project and the design group during the first five years of Intel's microprocessor effort. Faggin also created, while working at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, the self-aligned MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) silicon-gate technology (SGT), which made possible MOS semiconductor memory chips, CCD image sensors, and the microprocessor. After the 4004, he led development of the Intel 8008 and 8080, using his SGT methodology for random logic chip design, which was essential to the creation of early Intel microprocessors. He was co-founder (with Ralph Ungermann) and CEO of Zilog, the first company solely dedicated to microprocessors, and led the development of the Zilog Z80 and Z8 processors. He was later the co-founder and CEO of Cygnet Technologies, and then Synaptics. +In 2010, he received the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor the United States confers for achievements related to technological progress. In 2011, Faggin founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation to support the scientific study of consciousness at US universities and research institutes. In 2015, the Faggin Foundation helped to establish a $1 million endowment for the Faggin Family Presidential Chair in the Physics of Information at UC Santa Cruz to promote the study of "fundamental questions at the interface of physics and related fields including mathematics, complex systems, biophysics, and cognitive science, with the unifying theme of information in physics." + +== Education and early career == +Born in Vicenza, Italy, Federico grew up in an intellectual environment. His father, Giuseppe Faggin, was a scholar who wrote many academic books and translated, with commentaries, the Enneads of Plotinus from the original Greek into modern Italian. Federico had a strong interest in technology from an early age. He attended a technical high school in Vicenza, I.T.I.S. Alessandro Rossi, and later earned a laurea degree in physics, summa cum laude, from the University of Padua. + +=== Olivetti R&D Labs === +Faggin joined Olivetti at the age of 19. There he co-designed and led the implementation of a small digital transistor computer with 4 K × 12 bit of magnetic memory (1960). The Olivetti R&D department subsequently developed one of the world's first programmable desktop electronic calculators, the Olivetti Programma 101 (1964). After this first work experience, Faggin studied physics at the University of Padua and taught the electronics laboratory course for 3rd year physics students in the academic year 1965–1966. + +=== SGS-Fairchild === +In 1967, Faggin joined SGS-Fairchild, an Italy-based joint venture between the Italian company Società Generale Semiconduttori and the American firm Fairchild Semiconductor. There, he pioneered the MOS metal-gate process technology and designed the first two commercial MOS integrated circuits. Impressed by his achievements, the company transferred Faggin to Fairchild's Palo Alto, California offices in February 1968. When Fairchild exited the joint venture, he accepted a job offer to stay on with Fairchild. + +== Silicon Valley career == + +=== Fairchild Semiconductor === +In Palo Alto, Faggin led the development of silicon-gate technology (SGT), designing its unique process architecture. SGT, a MOSFET with a silicon self-aligned gate, became one of the most transformative advancements in microelectronics. +SGT laid the foundation for all modern NMOS and CMOS integrated circuits. It enabled key innovations, including MOS semiconductor memory chips, the first microprocessor, and the first CCD and EPROM with floating silicon gates. Replacing the earlier metal-gate MOS technology, SGT was rapidly adopted worldwide, and within a decade, it rendered bipolar transistors-based integrated circuits obsolete. + +=== Fairchild 3708 === +At Fairchild, Faggin designed the first commercial integrated circuit using silicon-gate technology with self-aligned MOSFET transistors: the Fairchild 3708. The 3708 was an 8-bit analog multiplexer with decoding logic, replacing the equivalent Fairchild 3705 that used metal-gate technology. The 3708 was 5 times faster, had 100 times less junction leakage and was much more reliable than the 3705, demonstrating the superiority of SGT over metal-gate MOS. See also: Faggin, F., Klein T. (1969). "A Faster Generation of MOS Devices With Low Threshold Is Riding The Crest of the New Wave, Silicon-Gate IC's". Electronics, 29 Sep. 1969. + +=== Intel === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1a0977ee0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Federico Faggin" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:11.564117+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Federico Faggin joined Intel from Fairchild in 1970 as the project leader and designer of the MCS-4 family of microprocessors, which included the 4004, the world's first single-chip microprocessor. Fairchild was not taking advantage of the SGT and Faggin wanted to use his new technology to design advanced chips. +The 4004 (1971) was made possible by the advanced capabilities of the silicon gate technology (SGT) being enhanced through the novel random logic chip design methodology that Faggin created at Intel. It was this new methodology, together with his several design innovations, that allowed him to fit the microprocessor in one small chip. A single-chip microprocessor – an idea that was expected to occur many years in the future – became possible in 1971 by using SGT with two additional innovations: (1) "buried contacts" that doubled the circuit density, and (2) the use of bootstrap loads with 2-phase clocks—previously considered impossible with SGT— that improved the speed 5 times, while reducing the chip area by half compared with metal-gate MOS. +The design methodology created by Faggin was utilized for the implementation of all Intel's early microprocessors and later also for Zilog's Z80. +The Intel 4004 – a 4-bit CPU (central processing unit) on a single chip – was a member of a family of 4 custom chips designed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturer. The other members of the family (constituting the MCS-4 family) were: the 4001, a 2k-bit metal-mask programmable ROM with programmable input-output lines; the 4002, a 320-bit dynamic RAM with a 4-bit output port; and the 4003, a 10-bit serial input and serial/parallel output, static shift register to use as an I/O expander. Faggin promoted the idea of broadly marketing the MCS-4 to customers other than Busicom by showing Intel management how customers could design a control system using the 4004. He designed and built a 4004 tester using the 4004 as the controller of the tester, thus convincing Bob Noyce to renegotiate the exclusivity clause with Busicom that didn't allow Intel to sell the MCS-4 line to other customers. +In 2009, the four contributors to the 4004 were inducted as Fellows of the Computer History Museum. Ted Hoff, head of Application Research Department, formulated the architectural proposal and the instruction set with assistance from Stan Mazor and working in conjunction with Busicom's Masatoshi Shima. However, none of them was a chip designer and none was familiar with the new Silicon Gate Technology (SGT). The silicon design was the essential missing ingredient to making a microprocessor since everything else was already known. Federico Faggin led the project in a different department without Hoff's and Mazor's involvement. Faggin had invented the original SGT at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 and provided additional refinements and inventions to make possible the implementation of the 4004 in a single chip. With routine help from Shima, Faggin completed the chip design in January 1971. +The Intel 2102A is a redesign of the Intel 2102 static RAM, where Federico Faggin introduced to Intel, for the first time, the depletion load, combining the silicon gate technology with ionic implantation. The design was done toward the end of 1973 by Federico Faggin and Dick Pashley. The 2102A was 5 times faster than the 2102, opening a new direction for Intel. + +=== Early Intel microprocessors === +Faggin's silicon design methodology was used for implementing all Intel's early microprocessors. +The Intel 8008 was the world's first single-chip 8-bit CPU and, like the 4004, was built with p-channel SGT. The 8008 development was originally assigned to Hal Feeney in March 1970 but was suspended until the 4004 was completed. It was resumed in January 1971 under Faggin's direction utilizing the basic circuits and methodology he had developed for the 4004, with Hal Feeney doing the chip design. The CPU architecture of the 8008 was originally created by CTC Inc. for the Datapoint 2200 intelligent terminal, in which it was implemented in discrete IC logic. +The Intel 4040 microprocessor (1974) was a much improved, machine-code-compatible version of the 4004 CPU allowing it to interface directly with standard memories and I/O devices. Federico Faggin created the architecture of the 4040 and supervised Tom Innes who did the design work. +The 8080 microprocessor (1974) was the first high-performance 8-bit microprocessor in the market, using the faster n-channel SGT. The 8080 was conceived and architected by Faggin, and designed by Masatoshi Shima under Faggin's supervision. The 8080 was a major improvement over the 8008 architecture, yet it retained software compatibility with it. It was much faster and easier to interface to external memory and I/O devices than the 8008. The high performance and low cost of the 8080 let developers use microprocessors for many new applications, including the forerunners of the personal computer. +When Faggin left Intel at the end of 1974 to found Zilog with Ralph Ungermann, he was R&D department manager responsible for all MOS products, except for dynamic memories. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f185c9d8b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Federico Faggin" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:11.564117+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Zilog === +The Zilog Z80 was the first microprocessor created by Zilog, the first company entirely dedicated to microprocessors. It was started by Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann in November 1974. Faggin was Zilog's president and CEO until the end of 1980 and he conceived and designed the Z80 CPU and its family of programmable peripheral components. He also co-designed the CPU whose project leader was Masatoshi Shima. +The Z80-CPU was a major improvement over the 8080, yet it retained software compatibility with it. Much faster and with more than twice as many registers and instructions of the 8080, it was part of a family of components that included several intelligent peripherals (the Z80-PIO, a programmable parallel input-output controller; the Z80-CTC, a programmable counter-timer; the Z80-SIO, programmable serial communications interface controller, and the Z80-DMA, programmable direct memory access controller). This chip family allowed the design of powerful and low-cost microcomputers with performance comparable to minicomputers. The Z80-CPU had a substantially better bus structure and interrupt structure than the 8080 and could interface directly with dynamic RAM, since it included an internal memory-refresh controller. The Z80 was used in many of early personal computers, as well as in video game systems such as the MSX, ColecoVision, Master System. The Z80 ceased production in 2024. +The Zilog Z8 micro controller (1978) was one of the first single-chip microcontrollers in the market. It integrated an 8-bit CPU, RAM, ROM and I/O facilities, sufficient for many control applications. Faggin conceived the Z8 in 1974, soon after he founded Zilog, but then decided to give priority to the Z80. The Z8 was designed in 1976–78 and ended production in 2024. + +=== The Communication CoSystem === +The Communication CoSystem (1984). The Cosystem was conceived by Faggin and designed and produced by Cygnet Technologies, Inc., the second startup company of Faggin. Attached to a personal computer and to a standard phone line, the CoSystem could automatically handle all the personal voice and data communications of the user, including electronic mail, database access, computer screen transfers during a voice communication, call record keeping, etc. The patent covering the CoSystem is highly cited in the personal communication field. + +=== Synaptics === +In 1986 Faggin co-founded and was CEO of Synaptics until 1999, becoming chairman from 1999 to 2009. Synaptics was initially dedicated to R&D in artificial neural networks for pattern-recognition applications using analog VLSI. Synaptics introduced the I1000, the world's first single-chip optical character recognizer in 1991. In 1994, Synaptics introduced the touchpad to replace the cumbersome trackball then in use in laptop computers. The touchpad was broadly adopted by the industry. Synaptics also introduced the early touchscreens that were eventually adopted for intelligent phones and tablets; applications that now dominate the market. Faggin came up with the general product idea and led a group of engineers who further refined the idea through many brainstorming sessions. Faggin is a co-inventor of ten patents assigned to Synaptics. He is chairman emeritus of Synaptics. + +=== Foveon === +During his tenure as president and CEO of Foveon, from 2003 to 2008, Faggin revitalized the company and provided a new technological and business direction resulting in image sensors superior in all critical parameters to the best sensors of the competition, while using approximately half the chip size of competing devices. Faggin also oversaw the successful acquisition of Foveon by the Japanese Sigma Corporation in November 2008. + +=== Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation === +Founded in 2011 the "Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation" supports the scientific study of consciousness at US universities and research institutes. The purpose of the Foundation is to advance the understanding of consciousness through theoretical and experimental research. Faggin's interest in consciousness has his roots in the study of artificial neural networks at Synaptics, a company he started in 1986, that prompted his inquiry into whether or not it is possible to build a conscious computer. + +== The theory of consciousness == +In the book Irreducible - Consciousness, life, computers, and human nature (Essentia Books, 2024), Federico Faggin proposed a theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a purely quantum phenomenon, unique to each of us. This theory is supported by two quantum physics theorems: the no-cloning theorem and Holevo's theorem. The first states that a pure quantum state is not reproducible; the second limits the amount of measurable information to one classical bit for each qubit that describes the state. Therefore, it is possible to postulate that a quantum system that is in a pure state is aware of its state, since conscious experiences (qualia) have all the essential properties of pure states, i.e., it is private knowledge only minimally knowable from the outside. However, the mathematical representation of the experience (the pure state) does not describe the experience, which remains private and knowable only from within by the system that is in that state. No classical machine can ever be conscious given that classical information is reproducible (program and data can be copied perfectly), while the quantum state is private. Consciousness is therefore not linked to the functioning of the body and can continue to exist even after the death of the body. The body behaves like a drone controlled "top down" by consciousness. The new D'Ariano-Faggin theory is based on the theoretical studies of Professor Giacomo D'Ariano, who derived quantum theory from principles based on information theory, and on the experiential, philosophical and scientific studies of Federico Faggin on the nature of consciousness. + +== Original documents == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6020a476e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +--- +title: "Federico Faggin" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:11.564117+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== On the MOS silicon-gate technology (SGT) for IC and the Fairchild 3708 (the first application of SGT) === +Faggin, F., Klein, T., and Vadasz, L.: Insulated Gate Field Effect Transistor Integrated Circuits with Silicon Gates. The Silicon Gate Technology with self-aligned gates was presented by its developer Federico Faggin at the IEEE International Electron Device Meeting on 23 October 1968, in Washington D.C. This new technology empowered the design of dynamic RAM memories, non-volatile memories, CCD sensors and the microprocessor. +Federico Faggin and Thomas Klein.: "A Faster Generation of MOS Devices with Low Thresholds is Riding the Crest of the New Wave, Silicon-Gate IC's". The article published in Electronics (29 September 1969) introduces the Fairchild 3708, the world's first commercial integrated circuit using Silicon Gate Technology, designed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968. +F. Faggin, T. Klein: Silicon-Gate Technology. "Solid State Electronics", 1970, Vol. 13, pp. 1125–1144 + +=== On the Intel 4004 microprocessor === +F. Faggin and M. E. Hoff: "Standard Parts and Custom Design Merge in a Four-chip Processor Kit". Electronics, 24 April 1972 +F. Faggin, et al.: "The MCS-4 An LSI Microcomputer System". IEEE 1972 Region Six Conference. +Faggin, Federico; Capocaccia, F. "A New Integrated MOS Shift Register", Proceedings XV International Electronics Scientific Congress, Rome, April 1968, pp. 143–152. This paper describes a novel static MOS shift register, developed at SGS-Fairchild (now ST Micro) at the end of 1967, before Federico Faggin joined Fairchild's R&D in Palo Alto (Ca) in February 1968. Faggin later used this new shift register in the MCS-4 chips, including the 4004. +Initials F.F. (Federico Faggin) on the 4004 design (1971). The 4004 bears the initials F.F. of its designer, Federico Faggin, etched on one corner of the chip. Signing the chip was a spontaneous gesture of proud authorship and was also an original idea imitated after him by many Intel designers. +Busicom 141-PF Printing Calculator Engineering Prototype (1971). (Gift of Federico Faggin to the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA). The CHM collection catalog shows pictures of the engineering prototype of the Busicom 141-PF desktop calculator. The engineering prototype used the world's first microprocessor to have ever been produced. This one-of-a-kind prototype was a personal present by Busicom's president Mr. Yoshio Kojima to Federico Faggin for his successful leadership of the design and development of the 4004 and three other memory and I/O chips (the MCS-4 chipset). After keeping it in his home for 25 years, Faggin donated it to the CHM in 1996. + +== Publications == + +=== Articles === +"The Birth of the Microprocessor" by Federico Faggin. Byte, March 1992, vol.17, no.3, pp. 145–150. +"The History of the 4004" by Federico Faggin, Marcian E. Hoff Jr., Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima. IEEE Micro, December 1996, Volume 16 Number 6. +"The 4004 microprocessor of Faggin, Hoff, Mazor, and Shima". IEEE Solid State Circuits Magazine, Winter 2009, vol.1 no.1. +"The MOS silicon gate technology and the first microprocessors" by Federico Faggin. La Rivista del Nuovo Cimento, year 2015, issue 12-December. SIF (Italian Physical Society) +"How we made the microprocessor" by Federico Faggin. Nature Electronics, vol. 1, January 2018. Published online: 8 January 2018 +"Hard Problem and Free Will: an information-theoretical approach" by Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano and Federico Faggin. arXiv:2012.06580 28. January 2021 + +=== Books === +Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness by Federico Faggin. Waterside Productions (February 2021) +Artificial Intelligence Versus Natural Intelligence. Springer International Publishing, January 2022 +Irriducibile - La coscienza, la vita, i computer e la nostra natura by Federico Faggin. Mondadori (August 2022) "Sono convinto che quando capiremo che la fisica quantistica non descrive la realtà esteriore ma quella interiore essa cesserà di essere incomprensibile.” +Irreducible - Consciousness, life, computers, and human nature, by Federico Faggin. Essentia Books 2024. +Oltre l'invisibile. Dove scienza e spiritualità si uniscono Mondadori (June 2024). + +== Awards == + +Source for the above-mentioned awards: + +2012: Global Information Technology Award from the President of Armenia. +2012: Honorary PhD from the Polytechnic University (Armenia) +2012: Premio Franca Florio, given by Ministro Francesco Profumo and Prof. Ing. Patrizia Livreri +2013: Honorary PhD in science from Chapman University (CA) +2014: Enrico Fermi Award, given by the Italian Society of Physics: "For the invention of the MOS silicon gate technology that led him to the realization in 1971 of the first modern microprocessor." +2018: 2018 IEEE Italy Section Honorary Award to Federico Faggin for his outstanding contributions to the self aligned MOS silicon gate theory & technology and to the development of the first microprocessor +2018: 2018 AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science +2019: PhD (Dottorato di ricerca) honoris causa in computer engineering from the University of Pisa (Italy) Università di Pisa. +2023: Sigillum Magnum from the University of Bologna + +== See also == +List of pioneers in computer science + +== References == + +== External links == + +the autobiography book: "Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness" 2019 - https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Invention-Microprocessor-Science-Consciousness-ebook/dp/B08W742297 + +The Intel 4004 Microprocessor and the Silicon Gate Technology, A testimonial from Federico Faggin, designer of the 4004 and developer of its enabling technology – Federico Faggin personally gives details, history and nitty-gritty details about the Intel 4004's development and his inventions, innovations and ideas that made it all possible. +"Executive Profile" from Foveon.com +IEEE Global History Network Biography of Federico Faggin +Oral History of Federico Faggin Computer History Museum. Recorded 2004–05 +Busicom Calculator Engineering Prototype (Gift of Federico Faggin to the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California). +Video of the Intel Intellec 4 microcomputer on YouTube +"Computers Still No Match for Human Intelligence" Video and article interview with Federico Faggin 40 years after the release of the Intel 4004 microprocessor \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a6901da9d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Fernhurst Research Station" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst_Research_Station" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:38.581799+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Fernhurst Research Station was a crop protection chemical research institute in West Sussex, mainly run by ICI, for the fruit industry. The site is to the east of the A286, around a mile south of the village of Fernhurst and a mile north of the Haslemere to Petersfield Serpent Trail. + + +== History == +Plant Protection Limited moved to the site in 1945 and opened a research institute on the estate of Sir Felix Schuster (1854–1936). The research institute was to investigate pest and disease control in horticultural crops. As well as being an administrative site, the station comprised a 60 acres (24 ha) orchard including 9 acres of plums and 26 acres of dessert apples at Hurstfold Farm. +In June 1951 an international conference, with scientists from 39 countries, took place at the site on food scarcity. On 10 May 1955, the site was visited by the Duke of Edinburgh. Another international conference took place at the site in June 1956. +In 1958 Plant Protection Limited became a wholly owned subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries: ICI Plant Protection Division, which had its international headquarters at the site until the 1990s; in 1986 a new international conference centre was opened on the site by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. ICI Public Health was formed in 1989 and based at the site. +Throughout its history, indoor and outdoor crops were grown for wholesale and for research, and the station developed advanced growing and application methods for crops, including the establishment of a film unit. In April 1990, the site won a Queen's Award for Technological Achievement for herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. +The site was taken over by Zeneca in 1994, and later Syngenta, becoming the headquarters of Syngenta Europe Ltd. Syngenta left the site in December 2001, and the site ceased to function as a research station or administrative centre apart from the principal building, which is the head office of Aspinal of London. The other office buildings were left unoccupied and were subsequently comprehensively vandalised. At its peak, around 700 people had worked at the site. + + +== Redevelopment == + +The redevelopment of the Highfield part of the site for housing was approved by the South Downs National Park Authority in 2020 and expanded upon in 2023. + + +== See also == +Fruit and Vegetable Preservation Research Station +Fruit picking +List of environmental research institutes +Scottish Crop Research Institute + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Britain From Above 1951: Verdley +Britain From Above: Hurstfold \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Miller_Lifetime_Achievement_Award-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Miller_Lifetime_Achievement_Award-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e0ffebbe0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Miller_Lifetime_Achievement_Award-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Miller_Lifetime_Achievement_Award" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:07.339428+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Genevieve Miller Lifetime Achievement Award, formerly known as the American Association for the History of Medicines's Lifetime Award, established in 1988, is presented annually to a retired member of the American Association for the History of Medicine who has demonstrated significant contributions to history of medicine. It was renamed in honour of Genevieve Miller in 2014. + + +== Recipients == + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sarton_Medal-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sarton_Medal-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..625fb0663 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sarton_Medal-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +--- +title: "George Sarton Medal" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sarton_Medal" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:08.535061+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The George Sarton Medal is the most prestigious award given by the History of Science Society. It has been awarded annually since 1955. It is awarded to a historian of science from the international community who became distinguished for "a lifetime of scholarly achievement" in the field. +The medal was designed by Bern Dibner and is named after George Sarton, the founder of the journal Isis and one of the founders of modern history of science. +The Sarton Medalists are: + +1955 – George Sarton +1956 – Charles Singer and Dorothea Waley Singer +1957 – Lynn Thorndike +1958 – John Farquhar Fulton +1959 – Richard Shryock +1960 – Owsei Temkin +1961 – Alexandre Koyré +1962 – E. J. Dijksterhuis +1963 – Vassili Zoubov +1964 – not awarded +1965 – J. R. Partington +1966 – Anneliese Maier +1967 – not awarded +1968 – Joseph Needham +1969 – Kurt Vogel +1970 – Walter Pagel +1971 – Willy Hartner +1972 – Kiyosi Yabuuti +1973 – Henry Guerlac +1974 – I. Bernard Cohen +1975 – René Taton +1976 – Bern Dibner +1977 – Derek T. Whiteside +1978 – Adolph Pavlovich Yushkevich +1979 – Maria Luisa Righini-Bonelli +1980 – Marshall Clagett +1981 – A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall +1982 – Thomas S. Kuhn +1983 – Georges Canguilhem +1984 – Charles Coulston Gillispie +1985 – Co-winners: Paolo Rossi and Richard S. Westfall +1986 – Ernst Mayr +1987 – G.E.R. Lloyd +1988 – Stillman Drake +1989 – Gerald Holton +1990 – A. Hunter Dupree +1991 – Mirko D. Grmek +1992 – Edward Grant +1993 – John L. Heilbron +1994 – Allen G. Debus +1995 – Charles E. Rosenberg +1996 – Loren Graham +1997 – Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs +1998 – Thomas L. Hankins +1999 – David C. Lindberg +2000 – Frederic L. Holmes +2001 – Daniel J. Kevles +2002 – John C. Greene +2003 – Nancy Siraisi +2004 – Robert E. Kohler +2005 – A. I. Sabra +2006 – Mary Jo Nye +2007 – Martin J. S. Rudwick +2008 – Ronald L. Numbers +2009 – John E. Murdoch +2010 – Michael McVaugh +2011 – Robert J. Richards +2012 – Lorraine Daston +2013 – Simon Schaffer +2014 – Steven Shapin +2015 – Robert Fox +2016 – Katharine Park +2017 – Garland E. Allen +2018 – Sally Gregory Kohlstedt +2019 – M. Norton Wise +2020 – Jim Bennett +2021 – Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent +2022 – Margaret W. Rossiter +2023 – Theodore Porter +2024 – Jane Maienschein +2025 – Pamela H. Smith +2026 – Lynn K. Nyhart + + +== See also == +List of history awards +List of general science and technology awards + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Sarton Medal webpage from the History of Science Society +History of Science Society, The Sarton Medalists Archived 2015-02-20 at the Wayback Machine +History of Science Society. "2007 Award Winners". Archived from the original on 2008-11-12. Retrieved 2008-11-26. +History of Science Society. "2008 Award Winners". Archived from the original on 2009-07-07. Retrieved 2008-11-26. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIST_Award_for_Outstanding_Achievement_in_the_History_of_Chemistry-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIST_Award_for_Outstanding_Achievement_in_the_History_of_Chemistry-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e1749d147 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIST_Award_for_Outstanding_Achievement_in_the_History_of_Chemistry-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,101 @@ +--- +title: "HIST Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIST_Award_for_Outstanding_Achievement_in_the_History_of_Chemistry" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:10.864389+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The HIST Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry (2013–present) is given by the Division of the History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The award was originally known as the Dexter Award (1956–2001) and then briefly as the Sidney M. Edelstein Award (2002–2009), both given by the ACS. +The Dexter Award was originally established by Sidney Milton Edelstein, a founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation, to recognize an "outstanding career of contributions to the history of chemistry". As the Dexter Award, it was sponsored by the Dexter Corporation except for its final two years, when it was sponsored by the Mildred and Sidney Edelstein Foundation. +The award was briefly known as the Sidney M. Edelstein Award from 2002 to 2009, but was still given by the ACS. As such, the Sidney M. Edelstein Award should be distinguished from the Sidney Edelstein Prize (1968–present), which has been given continuously since 1968 by the Society for the History of Technology to recognize "an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology." + + +== Recipients == + + +=== HIST Award (2013–present) === +2024 James L. Marshall and Virginia R. Marshall +2023 Geoffrey Rayner-Canham and Marelene Rayner-Canham +2022 Marco Beretta +2021 Mary Virginia Orna +2020 Lawrence M. Principe +2019 Otto Theodor Benfey +2018 David E. Lewis +2017 Jeffrey I. Seeman +2016 Ursula Klein +2015 Christoph Meinel +2014 Ernst Homburg +2013 William R. Newman +2012 No Award +2011 No Award + + +=== Sidney M. Edelstein Award (2002–2009) === +2009 Trevor Harvey Levere +2008 John Shipley Rowlinson +2007 Anthony S. Travis +2006 Peter J. T. Morris (Peter John Turnbull Morris) +2005 William B. Jensen +2004 Joseph B. Lambert +2003 David M. Knight +2002 John Parascandola + + +=== Dexter Award (1956–2001) === +2001 William Arthur Smeaton +2000 Alan Rocke +1999 Mary Jo Nye +1998 Seymour H. Mauskopf +1997 Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent +1996 Keith J. Laidler +1995 William H. Brock +1994 Frederic L. Holmes +1993 Joseph S. Fruton +1992 John T. Stock +1991 Owen Hannaway +1990 Colin A. Russell +1989 D. Stanley Tarbell +1988 (Lutz F. Haber) Ludwig F. Haber +1987 Allen G. Debus +1986 Robert G. W. Anderson +1985 Robert Multhauf +1984 Maurice Crosland +1983 Arnold Thackray +1982 John H. Wotiz +1981 Cyril Stanley Smith +1980 Maurice Daumas +1979 Joseph Needham +1978 George B. Kauffman +1977 Modesto Bargalló +1976 Trevor Illtyd Williams +1975 Jan W. van Spronsen (Johannes Willem van Spronsen) +1974 No Award +1973 Bernard Jaffe +1972 Henry Guerlac +1971 Wyndham D. Miles +1970 Ferenc Szabadváry +1969 Walter Pagel +1968 Aaron J. Ihde +1967 Mary Elvira Weeks +1966 Earle R. Caley +1965 Martin Levey +1964 Eduard Farber +1963 Douglas McKie +1962 Henry M. Leicester +1961 James R. Partington +1960 Denis Duveen +1959 John Read +1958 Eva Armstrong +1957 Williams Haynes +1956 Ralph E. Oesper + + +== See also == +List of chemistry awards +List of history awards + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..272b7602b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Harvard Institute for International Development" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:39.773620+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) was a think tank dedicated to helping nations join the global economy, operating between 1974 and 2000. It was a center within Harvard University, United States. + +== Foundation and leadership == +The Harvard Institute for International Development originated when Harvard University's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) tried to move away from a controversial role in giving advice on topics such as arms control, foreign aid and development. +The CFIA preferred a more academic role of teaching and research. +The Ford Foundation and other organizations involved in aid-giving still wanted Harvard to provide hands-on training for their staff. In 1962 the Development Advisory Service was established for this purpose, associated with the CFIA but independent. It was renamed the HIID in 1974. +In 1980 the economist Arnold Harberger of the Harvard University was selected as head of the institute. The announcement met with protests from students and staff since Harberger had previously advised the Augusto Pinochet military regime in Chile. +He withdrew and Dwight Perkins, an economist and specialist in China, took the job. +After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economist Jeffrey Sachs became head of the institute. + +== Development programs == +The HIID became the umbrella organization for overseas aid and development programs led by the university but funded by the government or foundations. +The HIID coordinated development assistance, training, and research on Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. The Institute helped developing nations to achieve economic growth and improve their people's welfare. +The institute provided staff for various development projects. For example, in the late 1970s David Korten headed a project funded by the Ford Foundation to assist in organization and management of national family-planning programs. +In 1991 the HIID launched a program called WorldTeach that sent college student and graduates to schools in developing countries for a one-year assignment. Countries that had requested volunteers were Costa Rica, Ecuador, Namibia, South Africa, Poland, Thailand and China. + +== Research == + +The HIID undertook many research projects related to international development. +For example, in the early 1980s, the HIID undertook a study of several of Indonesia's national development programs, including grants for village development, schools, family planning and rice yield improvement programs. The programs had been running for some time, but the study uncovered a number of anomalies that were affecting their efficiency. +The HIID collaborated with the Women In Development office of USAID in developing the Harvard Analytical Framework, also called the Gender Roles Framework, one of the earliest frameworks for understanding differences between men and women in their participation in the economy. This has great importance in helping policy makers understand the economic case for allocating resources to women as well as men. The framework was described in 1984. +In 1987, the International Tropical Timber Organization commissioned HIID to prepare a review of current knowledge of multiple-use management of tropical hardwood forests. Of interest was the potential for non-timber products and services that could assist in sustaining the forests. HIID completed the study in 1988 and issued updated versions in 1990 and 1992. +Research published in 1989 described the effects of price controls in emerging economies in creating parallel or black markets. +As Ukraine started the transition towards a market economy in the early 1990s, the HIID supported a survey on barter in transition economies. +In 1993, the HIID managed an education sector assessment in El Salvador under contract from USAID, the purpose being to obtain reliable information for use in setting a national educational policy. +The HIID and the Geneva-based World Economic Forum jointly produced the 1997 Global Competitiveness Report based on a late-1996 survey of 2,827 firms in 53 countries. Among other questions, respondents were asked to say how often they saw evidence of corruption, and the answers were used to rank each country. +In mid-1998 the World Economic Forum and HIID assembled a team of experts to determine the causes of the Asian financial crisis and the mechanisms of the crisis, to determine methods of reducing the probability of similar crises in the future and to identify policy changes that would help the affected countries resume growth. +In the late 1990s, USAID sponsored the Equity and Growth through Economic Research (EAGER) project, with the HIID commissioning work in eleven African countries. Both public strategies for growth and trade regimes for growth had both been intensively studied in the past, but resulting reforms had met little success. The focus of the EAGER research was to understand why programs had not been sustained, and what could be done to change that. +The above are just examples of the many research projects undertaken by the Institute. + +== Russian aid controversy == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..af9630d81 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,71 @@ +--- +title: "Harvard Institute for International Development" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Institute_for_International_Development" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:39.773620+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded a project by the HIID to help rebuild the Russian economy on the basis of western concepts of ethics, democracy and free markets. +Jeffrey Sachs was said to have "packaged HIID as an AID consultant". USAID were glad to accept help from Harvard, since they lacked expertise for such a project. +The HIID oversaw and guided disbursement of $300 million of US aid to Russia with little oversight by USAID. +HIID advisers worked closely with representatives from Russia, notably Anatoly Chubais and his associates. +Once USAID accepted help from the HIID, HIID was in a position to recommend U.S. aid policies while being a recipient of that aid. It also put the HIID in a position of power overseeing some of their competitors. +The project, which ran from 1992 to 1997, was headed by economist Andrei Shleifer and lawyer Jonathan Hay. +HIID received $40.4 million in return for its activities in Russia, awarded without the normal competitive bidding approach. +In 1996 the US Congress asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the HIID activities in the Russian aid program after multiple complaints to the congressional office had been made. The initial published GAO report considered the USAID's oversight over Harvard's Russia project "lax." The US government attempted to hold the Harvard players responsible for their clear conflicts of interest and undeniable misuse of government money but action was slow to ensue. +The original GAO report was critical, and further funding was withdrawn from HIID on the basis that as a contractor HIID has "abused the trust of the U.S. government by using personal relationships for private gain". +in 1997, the USAID ended a $14 million grant to the Harvard Institute for International Development after Andrei Shleifer was accused of using the institute to help his wife Nancy Zimmerman's investments in Russia. As part of a settlement, Zimmerman subsequently paid $1.5 million to the USG through one of her companies, Farallon Fixed Income Associates. +In September 2000, Shleifer and Hay were accused by the Justice Department of making personal investments in Russia, and therefore failing to act as impartial advisers. The episode became a factor in the dismissal of Larry Summers, who had set up the project as deputy secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton. + +== Dissolution == +The President of the institute from 1995, Jeffrey Sachs, resigned in 1999 to form the Center for International Development (CID), which would focus more on academic research than on consulting. +The CID was founded as a joint project of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the HIID. +A task force was appointed in July 1999 to review the future of the HIID, which in January 2000 concluded that it should be dissolved, with its functions distributed to faculties within the University. +Reasons included the Russian conflict of interest scandal, structural problems and financial deficits in 1998 and 1999. +In 2005, the university was required to pay the US government a settlement of $26.5 million for their involvement in the Russian development scandal. +The CID, housed at the Harvard Kennedy School, is now Harvard's primary center for research on international development. + +== Selected publications == +The institute began issuing a series of Development Discussion Papers soon after it began operation, and eventually published more than 700 papers by HIID staff members documenting their project experience and research results. +Sub-series covered agriculture and food policy, education, taxation, economic reform and the environment. +The HIID also published some full-length books that covered broader topics. Examples: + +Dwight Heald Perkins; Michael Roemer (1991). Reforming economic systems in developing countries. Harvard Institute for International Development. ISBN 0-674-75319-4. +Dwight Heald Perkins, ed. (1997). Assisting development in a changing world: the Harvard Institute for International Development, 1980–1995. Harvard Institute for International Development. ISBN 0-674-04997-7. +David L. Lindauer; Hanʼguk Kaebal Yŏnʼguwŏn (1997). The strains of economic growth: labor unrest and social dissatisfaction in Korea. Harvard Institute for International Development. ISBN 0-674-83981-1. +Richard D. Mallon (2000). The new missionaries: memoirs of a foreign adviser in less-developed countries. Harvard Institute for International Development. ISBN 0-674-00348-9. + +== Notable alumni == +Ronald MacLean Abaroa, mayor of La Paz, Bolivia +Betty Oyella Bigombe, Uganda government minister and consultant to the World Bank +Leonor Briones, treasurer of the Philippines 1998–2001 +Richard A. Cash, American global health researcher +Zéphirin Diabré, opposition political leader in Burkina Faso +John C. Edmunds, professor of Finance +John Luke Gallup, American economist +Rachel Glennerster, executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab +Mauricio Bailón González, general director of the General Directorate of International Affairs of the Secretariat of Health of México +Grace Goodell, professor of International Development +Christopher A. Hartwell, president, Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw +Jonathan Hay, on site general director of the HIID program in Russia +Catharine Bond Hill, president of Vassar College +David Korten, economist, author and political activist +David Laro, senior judge of the United States Tax Court +Nabiel Makarim, HIID policy analyst 1986–1989, Indonesia's State Minister of the Environment 2001–2004 +Alex Matthiessen, environmentalist +Geoffrey Maynard, economist, British Treasury +Basile Adjou Moumouni, Beninese physician, winner of the 1968 Presidential election, later annulled +Arunma Oteh, director general of the Nigerian Security and Exchange Commission +Catherine Overholt, co-developer of the Harvard Analytical Framework +Fernando Reimers, professor of International Education +Sócrates Rizzo, mayor of Monterrey (1989–1991) and governor of Nuevo León (1991–1996) +Jeffrey Sachs, economist, director of the institute 1995–1999 +Soumodip Sarkar, economist and management researcher +Andrei Shleifer, Russian American economist +Alejandro Toledo, affiliated researcher 1991–1994, later president of Peru +Clay G Wescott, American consultant and anti-corruption specialist + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..51eba5087 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +title: "Henry Stapp" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:28.142922+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Henry Pierce Stapp (born March 23, 1928) is an American mathematical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics, particularly the development of axiomatic S-matrix theory, the proofs of strong nonlocality properties, and the place of free will in the orthodox quantum mechanics of John von Neumann. He is considered a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. + + +== Biography == +Stapp received his PhD in particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Nobel laureates Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain. +In 1958, Stapp was invited by Wolfgang Pauli to ETH Zurich to work with him personally on basic problems in quantum mechanics. When Pauli died in December 1958, Stapp studied von Neumann's book on quantum mechanics, and on the basis of that work composed an article entitled "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics", which was not submitted for publication; but the title became the title of his 1993 book. +In 1969 Stapp was invited by Werner Heisenberg to work with him at the Max Planck Institute in Munich. +In 1976 Stapp was invited by J.A. Wheeler to work with him on problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Dr. Stapp has published many papers pertaining to the non-local aspects of quantum mechanics and Bell's theorem, including three books. +Stapp has worked also in a number of conventional areas of high energy physics, including analysis of the scattering of polarized protons, parity violation, and S-matrix theory. + + +== Research == +Some of Stapp's work concerns the implications of quantum mechanics. He has argued for the relevance of quantum mechanics to consciousness and free will. +Stapp favors consciousness causes collapse, the idea that quantum wave functions collapse only when they interact with consciousness as a consequence of "orthodox" quantum mechanics. He argues that quantum wave functions collapse when conscious minds select one among the alternative quantum possibilities. His hypothesis of how mind may interact with matter via quantum processes in the brain differs from that of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's orchestrated objective reduction. While they postulate quantum computing in the microtubules in brain neurons, Stapp postulates a more global collapse, a 'mind like' wave-function collapse that exploits certain aspects of the quantum Zeno effect within the synapses. Stapp's view of the neural correlate of attention is explained in his book, Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007). Stapp has claimed that consciousness is fundamental to the universe. +In this book he credits John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932) with providing an orthodox quantum mechanics demonstrating mathematically the essential role of quantum physics in the mind. Stapp has taken interest in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. He has proposed what he calls a "revised Whiteheadianism". He has also written a chapter "Whiteheadian Process and Quantum Theory" (pp. 92–102) in the book Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (2003). +His philosophy has been described as being influenced by both Heisenberg's physical realism and Bohr's idealism. A form of panpsychism Philosopher Gordon Globus noted that "Stapp unhesitatingly descends into panexperientialism". Stapp has co-authored papers with Jeffrey M. Schwartz. Schwartz has connected the work of Stapp with the concept of "mental force" and spiritual practices of Buddhism. + + +== Reception == +Stapp's work has drawn criticism from scientists such as David Bourget and Danko Georgiev. Recent papers and a book by Georgiev criticize Stapp's model in two aspects: (1) The mind in Stapp's model does not have its own wavefunction or density matrix, but nevertheless can act upon the brain using projection operators. Such usage is not compatible with standard quantum mechanics because one can attach any number of ghostly minds to any point in space that act upon physical quantum systems with any projection operators. Therefore, Stapp's model does not build upon "the prevailing principles of physics", but negates them. (2) Stapp's claim that quantum Zeno effect is robust against environmental decoherence directly contradicts a basic theorem in quantum information theory according to which acting with projection operators upon the density matrix of a quantum system can never decrease the von Neumann entropy of the system, but can only increase it. Stapp has responded to Bourget and Georgiev stating that the allegations of errors are incorrect. + + +== Selected publications == +Stapp, H; Schwartz, J. M; Beauregard, M. (2005). Quantum theory in neuroscience and psychology: A neurophysical model of mind-brain interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B. 360 (1458): 1309-1327. Full paper +Stapp, H; Schwartz, J. M; Beauregard, M. (2004). The volitional influence of the mind on the brain, with special reference to emotional self-regulation. In Beauregard, M. (Ed.). Consciousness, emotional self-regulation, and the brain, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Chapter 7. ISBN 90-272-5187-8 +Stapp, H. (2009). Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (The Frontiers Collection). Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-89653-1 +Stapp, H. (2011). Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Springer. ISBN 978-3-642-18075-0 +Stapp, H. (2017). Quantum Theory and Free Will: How Mental Intentions Translate into Bodily Actions. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-58301-3 + + +== See also == +Epistemological Letters +Consciousness causes collapse +Quantum mind +Quantum Zeno effect + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Donald, M. On the Work of Henry P. Stapp. +Streater, R. F. Quantum Theory on the Brain. +Ludwig, K. (1995). Why the Difference Between Quantum and Classical Physics is Irrelevant to the Mind/Body Problem. Psyche 2 (16). + + +== External links == +List of papers by Stapp on LBNL server +Stapp at the Chopra Foundation Archived 2014-12-09 at the Wayback Machine \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirst_Prize_and_Lectureship-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirst_Prize_and_Lectureship-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..15b5af9f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirst_Prize_and_Lectureship-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Hirst Prize and Lectureship" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirst_Prize_and_Lectureship" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:09.711005+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Hirst Prize and Lectureship is a biennial prize, jointly awarded by the London Mathematical Society (LMS) and the British Society for the History of Mathematics (BSHM). The prize recognises original and innovative contributions to the history of mathematics by an individual winner or by joint winners. +The prize was first awarded in 2015 (solely by the LMS) as part of the LMS's 150th anniversary celebrations. The prize is named in honour of Thomas Archer Hirst, who was from 1872 to 1874 the fifth President of the LMS. Any mathematician or historian of mathematics is eligible for the prize — except for previous winners of the De Morgan Medal, LMS's Pólya Prize, Fröhlich Prize, Naylor Prize and Lectureship, Senior Whitehead Prize, Senior Anne Bennett Prize, or the Christopher Zeeman Medal. In the year for awarding the prize, the members of the Hirst Prize Committee, the members of the LMS and BSHM Councils are also ineligible. +The administration of the Hirst Prize alternates between the LMS and the BSHM offices, but the LMS alone organises the Hirst Lectureship. The lecture normally takes place in the year following the award of the Hirst Prize, and the venue for the lecture is chosen by the winner (or winners) of the Hirst Prize. + + +== Recipients == +2015: Edmund F. Robertson and John Joseph O'Connor (joint winners) +2016 lecture: History of Mathematics: Some Personal Thoughts +2018: Jeremy Gray +2019 lecture: Jesse Douglas, Minimal Surfaces, and the first Fields Medal +2021: Karine Chemla +2022 lecture: Algebraic work with operations in China, 1st century—13th century +2023: Erhard Scholz +2024 lecture: From Grassmann complements to Hodge duality +2025: June Barrow-Green +2026 lecture: George Birkhoff: 'The Poincaré of America' + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..db0dce58d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 1/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the history of gunpowder there are a range of theories about the transmission of the knowledge of gunpowder and guns from Imperial China to the rest of the world following the Song, Jin and Yuan dynasties. The earliest bronze guns found in China date back to the 13th century, with archaeological and textual evidence for previous nascent gunpowder technology developed beforehand. Scholars note the scarcity of records for firearms in the Middle East prior to the mid-14th century, and in Russia before the late 14th century, yet cannons already appeared in Europe by the early 14th century. This has led to theories that gunpowder or the gun was independently invented in Europe. Less accepted theories include gunpowder as being independently invented in the Middle East or South Asia. + +== Theories of non-Chinese invention == +The earliest gunpowder recipe and gunpowder weapons date to China's Song dynasty and the oldest extant guns appear in the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China. However, historian Tonio Andrade notes that there is a surprising scarcity of reliable evidence of firearms in Iran or Central Asia prior to the late 14th century. He argues that, in the Middle East, no guns are mentioned prior to the 1360s, while Russian records do not contain reliable mentions of firearms until 1382, after the gun's arrival in western Europe, despite their closer proximity and interactions with the Mongol empires. + +=== European origin === + +Although there is some evidence that points to the possible appearance of guns in Andalusia as early as the 1330s, Thomas T. Allsen says that "in the Latin West the first uncontestable evidence of firearms is from 1326, surprisingly somewhat earlier than in the lands that lie between China ... and western Europe. This has caused some doubt among historians on the gun transmission theory, and even whether or not there was a transmission at all. One dissident opinion comes from Stephen Morillo, Jeremy Black, and Paul Lococo's War in World History which argues that "the sources are not entirely clear about Chinese use of gunpowder in guns. There are references to bamboo and iron cannons, or perhaps proto-cannons, but these seem to have been small, unreliable, handheld weapons in this period. The Chinese do seem to have invented guns independently of the Europeans, at least in principle; but, in terms of effective cannon, the edge goes to Europe." +There was a stream of thought in Europe that emerged in the early 15th century that attributed the invention of both gunpowder and the gun to a certain Berthold Schwartz (Niger Berchtoldus or "Black Berthold"). By the turn of the 16th century, the story of Black Berthold was being repeated by numerous writers. In 1605, William Camden declared: + +Some have sayled a long course as farre as China, the farthest part of the world, to fetch the invention of guns from thence, but we know the Spanicsh proverb 'long waies, long lies'. One writeth, I know not upon whose credit, that Roger Bacon, commonly called Friar Bacon, knew how to make an engine which with saltpetre and Brimstone, should prove notable for Batterie, but he, tendering the safety of mankind, would not discover it. The best approved authors agree that guns were invented in Germanie, by Berthold Swarte, a Monke skilful in Gebers Cookery or Alchimy, who tempering Brimstone and saltpetre in a mortar, perceived the force by casting up the stone which covered it, when a sparke fell upon it.... +It is not exactly certain who Berthold was or if he ever existed as there are no contemporary records of him. Some consider him a mythical figure, used as a stand-in "for all the curious and ingenious experiments related to the new and dangerous mixture of saltpetre, sulfur (brimstone) and carbon." According to Henry Pratap Phillips, Berthold Schwartz was actually named Constantin Anchlitzen, and made gunpowder at Freiburg around the year 1330. J.R. Partington believes Schwartz is a purely legendary figure invented for the purpose of providing a German origin for gunpowder and cannon. Historian Jack Kelly concurs that Berthold was a "legendary figure" that existed to bolster German claims to the invention of the gun and to shield Europeans from the "fact that gunpowder, a critical force in their history, had emerged not from their own inventiveness." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1a4eb8495 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 2/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Some European, especially German researchers of firearms history, believed that a German monk, Berthold Schwarz, is the inventor of gunpowder. However, there are different theories regarding various data concerning Berthold inventing gunpowder, including his last name, his nationality, his religion, the year, and location of the invention. The earliest German document mentioning him says that he was a Greek engaged in alchemy, rather than a monk. Later, there were theories saying that he was from Denmark, Prague, Cologne, Freiburg, Braunschweig, and Metz. In religious denomination, he was said by some to be a member of Franciscan faction of Christianity, and by others to be of the Dominique faction. No one can say for sure. When it comes to the year of his inventing gunpowder, there are a variety of claims, including 1,250, 1,313, 1,348, 1,354, 1,372, 1,380, and 1,393, with a difference as great as 143 years. +The dating of Schwartz' invention of gunpowder, given by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher as 1354, is also later than even the first usage of cannons in Europe. The chronological problem did not go unnoticed and in 1732, Hermann Boerhaave shifted the invention of gunpowder to Roger Bacon while Schwartz was relegated to the role of discovering its explosive military properties. In 1753, Peter Shaw dismissed Schwartz by pointing to European usage of cannons as early as 1338. The idea of Berthold Schwartz as the inventor of gunpowder had already begun to decline in the 17th century. Two years after writing about Schwartz' invention of gunpowder, Kircher changed his mind and said that the "invention of gunpowder, which is not possible to deny took place long before our times in China." In 1678, the commander Louis de Gaya downgraded Schwartz' status as an inventor to a mere transmitter. According to de Gaya, Schwartz obtained gunpowder, invented in China, from Tartars during his travels in Muscovy around 1380. The idea that gunpowder was a Chinese invention was not new to Europeans by then, and had been in circulation in Europe since at least the late 16th century. According to Juan de Mendoza, writing in 1585, the Chinese told the Portuguese that they had invented gunpowder, contradicting their own belief that "an Almane" had been the inventor. By the 18th century, missionary writers with access to Chinese records were convinced that gunpowder and firearms had been invented in China. While Europeans increasingly came to accept that gunpowder and other inventions such as paper, printing, and the compass had originated in China, they added an Orientalist twist to the narrative: "only rational Europeans were able to fully utilize the inventions to create the modern age, while the backward Chinese had squandered them." Belief in a European origin also never died entirely. A well known monograph on the history of artillery by Colonel Henry Hime, published in 1915, attributed the discovery of gunpowder to Roger Bacon and claimed gunpowder was brought to China from the West. + +A deeply rooted misconception in the West holds that the Chinese never used gunpowder for war, that they employed one of the most potent inventions in the history of mankind for idle entertainment and children's whizbangs. This received wisdom is categorically false. The notion of China's benign relationship with gunpowder sprang in part from Western prejudices about the Chinese character. Some viewed the Chinese as dilettantes who stumbled onto the secret of gunpowder but couldn't envision its potential. Others saw them as pacifist sages who wisely turned away from its destructive possibilities. +Scholars suggest that the lack of gunpowder weapons in a well-traveled Venetian's catalogue for a new crusade in 1321 implies that guns were unknown in Europe up until this point, while the earliest Latin and Arabic descriptions of purifying saltpeter, a key ingredient in gunpowder, does not appear until the 13th century, seven centuries after the Chinese. Others have tried to extrapolate ancient mentions of producing thunder as proof of gunpowder, but invariably run into problems with dating, anachronisms, and interpolations, leading modern arms historians to conclude that true gunpowder was unknown in Europe before the 13th century. + +=== Islamic origin === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7e0dfc615 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 3/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +There is an independent invention theory supporting an Islamic origin of the gun, citing the Mamluk deployment of hand cannons in 1260 and a passage by Ibn Khaldun on the Marinid Siege of Sijilmassa in 1274: "[The Sultan] installed siege engines ... and gunpowder engines ..., which project small balls of iron. These balls are ejected from a chamber ... placed in front of a kindling fire of gunpowder; this happens by a strange property which attributes all actions to the power of the Creator." The passage, dated to 1382, and its interpretation has been rejected as anachronistic by most historians, who urge caution regarding claims of Islamic firearms use in the 1204–1324 period as late medieval Arabic texts used the same word for gunpowder, naft, as they did for an earlier incendiary, naphtha. Needham believes Ibn Khaldun was speaking of fire lances or proto-guns rather than hand cannon. +Historian Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, based on his analysis of 14th-century Arabic manuscripts which he argues to be copies of earlier texts, claims that hand cannons were used at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260. However Hassan's claims have been refuted by other historians such as David Ayalon, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Joseph Needham, Tonio Andrade, and Gabor Ágoston. Khan argues that it was the Mongols who introduced gunpowder to the Islamic world, and believes cannons only reached Mamluk Egypt in the 1370s. According to Needham, fire lances or proto-guns were known to Muslims by the late 13th century and early 14th century. However the term midfa, dated to textual sources from 1342 to 1352, cannot be proven to be true hand-guns or bombards, and contemporary accounts of a metal-barrel cannon in the Islamic world do not occur until 1365. Needham also concludes that in its original form the term midfa refers to the tube or cylinder of a naphtha projector (flamethrower), then after the invention of gunpowder it meant the tube of fire lances, and eventually it applied to the cylinder of hand-gun and cannon. Similarly, Andrade dates the textual appearance of cannon in middle eastern sources to the 1360s. Gabor Ágoston and David Ayalon believe the Mamluks had certainly used siege cannon by the 1360s, but earlier uses of cannon in the Islamic World are vague with a possible appearance in the Emirate of Granada by the 1320s, however evidence is inconclusive. + +=== Indian origin === + +The idea that that ancient Hindus had knowledge of gunpowder traces back to two 18th century authors: N.B. Halhed and Q. Craufurd. Halhed's Persian translation of a Sanskrit digest of laws, Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), translates agni-astra as "firearms" or "fire-arrow discharged from bamboo," and sataghni, which literally means "hundred-killer" as "cannon." Craufurd's text published in 1790 thought the old Hindus used gunpowder but was doubtful of their use before Europeans. In 1848, Professor Wilson, Director of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, wrote that Indians were well acquainted with gunpowder and that rockets were an Indian invention. According to H.M. Elliot's The History of India as Told by its own Historians (1875), saltpetre may have possibly been used in explosives mentioned in the Ramayana and Sri Bhagavat. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5e142bcb0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 4/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +There is no clear proof that gunpowder and rockets were known in any other country earlier than in China. J. Dubois (1765-1848) maintained that rockets were invented in India as early as 300 BCE, on the grounds that the ancient Sanskrit classic, the Rāmāyaṇa, spoke of vāṇa or bāṇa, which was at one time thought to mean 'rocket'. W. Egerton regarded the agnyastra of the Vedic Hymns as a type of rocket. Further examination of the Rāmayaṇa shows, however, that the term vāṇa or bāṇa simply means an arrow shot from a bow'. +In 1880, Gustav Oppert claimed that the oldest documents describing gunpowder were the Sanskrit texts Sukraniti and Nitiprakasika. The Sukraniti contains descriptions of firearms and a formula for agni-curna (fire-powder) or 'suvarcilavana' (well-shining salt) very similar to that mentioned the Wujing Zongyao: 5 parts saltpetre, 1 part sulphur, and 1 part charcoal. The two firearms mentioned in the Sukraniti are a musket and a cart-drawn gun. There are no definite dates for these works despite claims of their antiquity. Oppert uses archaeological evidence from the ancient temple carvings in India, where soldiers are depicted carrying or in some cases firing the firearms, as proof of ancient use of firearms. Most of these temples are not older than 500 years except Tirupallani temple. However he claims the use of firearms in Sukraniti as authentic and the use of firearms and gunpowder in India since the ancient Vedic period (1500–500 BCE). +The ingredients listed in Sukraniti as constituents for gunpowder such as realgar, opiment, lac, camphor, indigo, pine gum, magnetic oxide of iron, vermillion, graphite are used in the manufacture of incendiary weapons in Arthashastra and also appear in Chinese accounts. +The Arthashastra lists recipes for explosive and inflammable powder called 'agnisamyogas' or 'agniyoga' which J.R. Partington notes are very similar to gunpowder recipes quoted in Chinese, Arabic and European texts. However they do not contain saltpetre. A. Kalyanamaran argues that sulphur was not needed to create gunpowder and nitre could be obtained from fermented dung mentioned in the ingredients. The Greek historian Philostratos cites a letter written by Alexander saying that the reason why the Greek army refrained from advancing from Hydaspis to Ganges was because of the frightful dangers it encountered when people of Oxydraces threw flaming thunderbolts from the top of their forts. H. Wilkinson, who also believes Greek Fire was first discovered by the Indians, considers this as the earliest evidence of gunpowder in the world. According to J. Backman, gunpowder was invented in India and brought to Europe by Muslims. A device in the Arthashastra called ulka is used as a shower of firebrand which makes a thunder sound (or noise of drumming) in the sky which according to the Arthashastra is used by astrologists to show it to the enemy subjects on the day of their birth star. Authors such as A 7th century Chinese text mentions that people in northwest India were familiar with saltpetre and used it to produce purple flames. +Nitisara, variously dated between 4th century BCE – 6th century CE, is a treatise by a Buddhist scholar named Kamandaka mentions gunfiring (nalikadibhdi) and states that the bodyguards of the king should rouse him with gun-firing if he indulges in girls, drinks, bouts etc. The gun firing was probably shotless military pyrotechnic using tubular weapons (although Oppert states that another word 'Nadika'' is also used in one of the text's version and may well mean gongs). +Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi mentions in a treaties dated 910 a material called 'Indian salt', which he describes as "black and friable, with very little glitter," which has been interpreted as saltpetre by Berthelot but this is disputed by Joseph Needham. According to Firishta, Mehmud Ghaznavi (r. 999–1030) employed 1,008 cannon (top) and muskets (tufang) during his battle of Peshawar with Kabul Shahi king Anandapal. In a text called Mujmalut Tawarikh dated to 1126 which was translated from Arabic which itself was based on an original Sanskrit work, some type of grenade shaped like a terracotta elephant with a fuse is mentioned which was placed in the army van and when the invading army drew near, it exploded and the flames destroyed great portion of that army. + +Many western military and arms historians, as well as some Indian scholars, have cast doubts on the authenticity of the Sukraniti, mainly for two reasons. First, this work could not be dated with reasonable certainty and, second, the descriptions of gunpowder and firearms given in it appear to be far too advanced for the period to which this work is generally assigned. A few scholars are also of the opinion that the entire book is a clever piece of forgery. +According to Henry Pratap Phillips, some content in the Sanskrit works resemble that found in the Wujing Zongyao and it is possible that it was borrowed from the latter. However he believes it is the opposite and the gunpowder formula in the Wujing Zongyao came from the Sukraniti. Phillips and Oppert both consider The Rajalakshminarayana Hradaya, which Oppert dates to a "very remote period," as proof of ancient Indian knowledge of gunpowder since it mentions charcoal, sulphur, and other materials in the preparation of fire. The lack of saltpetre is explained by Phillips as a conscious omission for the sake of secrecy. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a85a14280 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 5/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Chinese texts are usually fairly precisely dated, whilst Indian works are often not. This difficulty must not be allowed to impair the interest or value of Indian works, but they must also be examined from the point of view of their scientific and technical contents with due care and with a suitably critical attitude. I feel that Oppert's treatment does not satisfy this requirement. +J.R. Partington rejected Oppert's claims in his A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder. Partington believes that the sataghni mentioned in Sanskrit text was an iron-mace rather than a cannon while Joseph Needham is of the opinion that its translation as cannon cannot be sustained. The word for cannon, nalika, does not appear in any Sanskrit dictionary, and the source of Sukraniti is the mythical Sukracharya. There is also no classical Sanskrit word for saltpetre while shoraka in late Sanskrit is derived from Persian. Rajendralal Mitra raised doubts about the age of another work by Usanas, Nitisara of Sukracharya, noting that it contains descriptions of firearms as they were a hundred years ago. In Partington's opinion the work is legendary. In 1902, P.C. Ray raised doubts about the authenticity of textual evidence supporting ancient Hindu knowledge of gunpowder. Ray pointed out that the gunpowder mixture of 4:1:1 saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur found in Sukraniti was the most efficient for guns and was not known in Europe until the 16th century, leading him to believe that the content was an interpolation by "the handiwork of some charlatan." P.K. Gode provided textual evidence that pyrotechnical recipes recorded in the Sanskrit treatise, Kautukacintamani, were copied from a Chinese source. Some scholars based on the fact that it mentions matchlock firearms date the text to the modern period. Similarly H.L. Blackmore wrote in 1965 that Oppert's theories were absurd and no proper attempt to date the sources had been made. H.W.L. Hime goes as far as to say that "early Indian gunpowder is definitely a fiction" while Partington calls it a "legend." According to Kaushik Roy, the ancient and medieval Indians used saltpetre for incendiary devices but not for gunpowder. + +== Arguments for and against Chinese transmission == + +=== Transmission theory === +According to Tonio Andrade, the nature and etymology of gunpowder in Europe intrinsically favor of the transmission theory rather than an independent invention. While records of gunpowder weapons and their evolution into the gun exist in China, "there are no records of any such developments in Europe," and the arrival of the gun in Europe was such that it "appears fully formed around 1326." There are also older and more numerous formulas of gunpowder using a variety of different proportions of key ingredients – saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal – which he believes is proof of its evolution and experimentation in China, where gunpowder was first applied to warfare as an incendiary, then explosive, and finally as a propellant. In contrast gunpowder formulas in Europe appear both later and offer very little divergence from the already ideal proportions for the purpose of creating an explosive and propellant powder. Kelly DeVries points out the idea that European records contained zero evidence of gunpowder developments is not strictly true, as compilers of early gunpowder recipes in Europe understood that should the instrument carrying gunpowder be enclosed on one end, the gunpowder reaction inside would produce "flying fire." +Another facet of the gunpowder transmission theory is the appearance of gunpowder in Europe ready made for military usage, and is generally referred to as gunpowder rather than a civilian term such as the Chinese "fire-drug," which suggests an originally non-military usage, whereas in Europe it was almost immediately and exclusively used for its military qualities. Muslim terms of saltpeter may also point toward a gunpowder transmission, if not the gun itself, as an Andalusian botanist referred to it as "Chinese snow," while in Persia it was called "Chinese salt." Joseph Needham claims that "all the long preparations and tentative experiments were made in China, and everything came to Islam and the West fully fledged, whether it was the fire-lance or the explosive bomb, the rocket or the metal-barrel hand-gun and bombard." However, theories of European, Islamic, and Indian origins for the gun and gunpowder still persist today in tandem with the transmission theory. + +=== Mongol vector === +Proponents of China as the inventor of gunpowder and the gun emphasize the older history of gunpowder evolution as attested by historical records and archaeological samples in China, its less obviously militarily focused name as "fire medicine," the Mongol role as a catalyst in disseminating gunpowder technology, and criticizes the scant or absent evidence of prior experimentation with gunpowder in Europe for non-military purposes before the arrival of the gun. However, there are still several blanks in the history of a gun transmission theory and the questions they raise which its proponents have been unable to answer. The rapid spread of guns across Eurasia, only 50 years from China to Europe, with non-existent evidence of its route from one extreme of the continent to the other, remains a mystery. Other Chinese inventions such as the compass, paper, and printing took centuries to reach Europe, with events such as the Battle of Talas as perhaps a possible takeoff point for discussion. No such event exists on record for either gunpowder or the gun. There is simply no clear route of transmission, and while the Mongols are often pointed to as the likeliest vector, Timothy May points out that "there is no concrete evidence that the Mongols used gunpowder weapons on a regular basis outside of China." According to Kate Raphael, the list of Chinese specialists recruited by Genghis Khan and Hulagu provided by the History of Yuan includes only carpenters and blacksmiths, but no gunpowder workers. A conclusion most military historians in the transmission camp have come to is that the rapid diffusion of gunpowder and the gun is probably best explained by its clear military applications. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fac5bf04c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 6/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Although the spread of gunpowder is directly related to the rise of the Mongols and the Pax Mongolica, it is unclear whether the Mongols themselves contributed to the spread. Some historians have claimed the Mongols used gunpowder weapons, essentially bombs hurled by catapults, in the Middle East and perhaps Eastern Europe; unfortunately there is no definite documentary or archaeological evidence to confirm it. Considering the Mongols rarely met a weapon they did not like, we can be certain that if they found a way to transport it safely it would have been incorporated into their arsenal outside China. Nonetheless, it remains speculation... However... the Mongols used it in their wars against the Jin, the Song and in their invasions of Japan. + +=== Independent invention theory === +Opponents of the transmission theory criticize the vagueness of Chinese records on the specific usage of gunpowder in weaponry, the existence of gunpowder or possibly lack thereof in incendiary weapons as described by Chinese documents, the weakness of Chinese firearms, the non-existent route of diffusion or evidence of guns between Europe and China before 1326, and emphasize the independent evolution of superior guns in Europe. However, this line of thought is problematic for a number of reasons. Notably, there is an acute dearth of any significant evidence of evolution or experimentation with gunpowder or gunpowder weapons leading up to the gun in 1326, which can be found in China. Gunpowder appeared in Europe primed for military usage as an explosive and propellant, bypassing a process which took centuries of Chinese experimentation with gunpowder weaponry to reach, making a nearly instantaneous and seamless transition into gun warfare, as its name suggests. Furthermore, early European gunpowder recipes shared identical defects with Chinese recipes such as the inclusion of the poisons sal ammoniac and arsenic, which provide no benefit to gunpowder. Bert S. Hall explains this phenomenon in his Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics by drawing upon the gunpowder transmission theory, explaining that "gunpowder came [to Europe], not as an ancient mystery, but as a well-developed modern technology, in a manner very much like twentieth-century 'technology-transfer' projects." In a similar vein Peter Lorge supposes that the Europeans experienced gunpowder "free from preconceived notions of what could be done," in contrast to China, "where a wide range of formulas and a broad variety of weapons demonstrated the full range of possibilities and limitations of the technologies involved." There is also the vestige of Chinese influence, and not European, on Muslim terminology of some gunpowder related items such as saltpeter, which has been described as either Chinese snow or salt, fireworks which were called Chinese flowers, and rockets which were called Chinese arrows. Moreover, Europeans in particular experienced great difficulty in obtaining saltpeter, a primary ingredient of gunpowder which was relatively scarce in Europe compared to China, and had to be obtained from "distant lands or extracted at high cost from soil rich in dung and urine." Thomas Arnold believes that the similarities between early European cannons and contemporary Chinese models suggests a direct transmission of cannon making knowledge from China rather than a home grown development. Whatever the truth may be, the first unambiguous references to guns appeared in Europe in the 1320s. + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..941b63b49 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of gunpowder and gun transmission" +chunk: 7/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_gunpowder_and_gun_transmission" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:47.872458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Bibliography == +Ágoston, Gábor (2005), Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-60391-1 +Andrade, Tonio (2016), The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-13597-7. +Arnold, Thomas (2001), The Renaissance at War, Cassell & Co, ISBN 978-0-304-35270-8 +Bachrach, David Stewart (July 2008). "Review of Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History". Technology and Culture. 49 (3). Aldershot: Ashgate: 785–786. doi:10.1353/tech.0.0051. S2CID 111173101. +Buchanan, Brenda J. (2006), Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-7546-5259-5 +Chase, Kenneth (2003), Firearms: A Global History to 1700, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-82274-9. +Cressy, David (2013), Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder, Oxford University Press +Kalyanaraman, A. (1903). The Saga Of The Indo-aryans. +Kelly, Jack (2004), Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World, Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-03718-6. +Khan, Iqtidar Alam (1996). "Coming of Gunpowder to the Islamic World and North India: Spotlight on the Role of the Mongols". Journal of Asian History. 30: 41–45. +Khan, Iqtidar Alam (2004), Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India, Oxford University Press +Khan, Iqtidar Alam (2008), Historical Dictionary of Medieval India, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., ISBN 978-0-8108-5503-8 +Liang, Jieming (2006), Chinese Siege Warfare: Mechanical Artillery & Siege Weapons of Antiquity, Singapore, Republic of Singapore: Leong Kit Meng, ISBN 978-981-05-5380-7 +Lorge, Peter (2005), Warfare in China to 1600, Routledge +Lorge, Peter A. (2008), The Asian Military Revolution: from Gunpowder to the Bomb, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-60954-8 +Lu, Yongxiang (2015), A History of Chinese Science and Technology 2 +May, Timothy (2012), The Mongol Conquests in World History, Reaktion Books +Morillo, Stephen (2008), War in World History: Society, Technology, and War from Ancient Times to the Present, Volume 1, To 1500, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 978-0-07-052584-9 +Needham, Joseph (1971), Science & Civilization in China: Volume 4 Part 3, Cambridge University Press +Needham, Joseph (1980), Science & Civilisation in China: Volume 5 Part 4, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-08573-1 +Needham, Joseph (1986). Science & Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-30358-3. +Oppert, Gustav Salomon (1880). On the weapons, army organisation, and political maxims of the ancient Hindus, with special reference to gunpowder and firearms. Albrecht Weber; Lakshmīkānta Varmā; Śukra.; Vaiśaṃpāyana. Madras: Higginbotham. +Partington, J.R. (1999), A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ISBN 978-0-8018-5954-0 +Phillips, Henry Prataps (2016), The History and Chronology of Gunpowder and Gunpowder Weapons (c.1000 to 1850), Notion Press, ISBN 9789352067633 +Purton, Peter (2010), A History of the Late Medieval Siege, 1200–1500, Boydell Press, ISBN 978-1-84383-449-6 +Raphael, Kate (2011). Muslim fortresses in the Levant: between Crusaders and Mongols. Culture and civilization in the Middle East. Vol. 23. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-4155-6925-5. +Roy, Kaushik (2014). Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400–1750. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-7809-3765-6. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0b3ebbcf1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of science" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:32.266326+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The historiography of science is the study of the history and methodology of the sub-discipline of history known as the history of science, including its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods, theories, schools), and controversies. Its subject is the variety of ways that science's past has been written about. +The earliest histories of science were written by scientists largely as celebrations of scientific progress. Scholars in the 19th and early 20th century frequently treated the history and philosophy of science as a single scholarly undertaking but the fields began to diverge under the influence of logical positivism, which demarcated scientific justification as the proper concern of philosophy, leaving scientific discovery to the historians. +The increasing professionalization of science history (i.e. the emergence of "history of science" as an independent field) in the 20th century and the entry of sociologists into the field caused friction with scientists and "practitioner" historians (practicing or retired scientists writing about their own fields). The divide has often centered on a disagreement over whether the history of science should be an accounting of scientific progress or a critical analysis of science as a cultural activity, a split in point-of-view that has been both exacerbated and reinforced by a wider cultural fracturing between the sciences and the humanities in the 20th century. Since the history of science requires a difficult intellectual "bilingualism" that straddles science and history, the polarization of the surrounding culture remains an inherent, and ongoing, challenge for the field. +Disagreement between scientists and non-scientists writing about the history of science reached a climax during the "science wars" of the 1990s when prominent scientists criticized sociologists and historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature in favor of political explanations when writing science history. Some science historians have acknowledged the reality of the divide but also argued that it can be bridged by scholars who are trained as both scientists and historians. + +== Scientists == + +=== Narratives of progress === + +General historians have, historically, been inclined to leave the history of science to specialists. The first histories of science, in the 18th century, were instead written by Enlightenment-era scientists like Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725-1799),, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) who generally saw history as a pedagogic tool for celebrating the progress of human reason and/or as a narrative of a linear and progressive march toward the superior knowledge of the present. Biographies of scientists were also popular in the 19th century, helping to amplify Newton's reputation as both a scientific genius and national hero in Great Britain. By the mid-20th century, however, historians specializing in the history of science began to disparage these earlier efforts. In particular, they criticized "practitioner" (i.e. scientist) historians for systematically neglecting primary sources, failing to truly understand those sources when they didn't neglect them, being oblivious to the social (i.e. "external") context of science and favoring hagiographic stories of scientist-heroes and their myopic, misguided and/or prejudiced adversaries. + +=== Science wars === + +While most scientists writing history of science have tended to favor an internalist approach, the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen (1893-1936) was a notable exception, arguing that even Newton’s physics was a direct product of the economic needs of 17th-century British capitalism. Hessen’s externalist approach gained momentum over the following decades as sociologists entered the field, but it also eventually sparked a backlash from scientists and philosophers in the 1990s who fiercely criticized sociologists and externalist historians for ignoring the objective reality of nature and for their position that the history of science should be written without regard for whether the theories involved were actually correct. The "frenzied confrontations" of this conflict - later known as the science wars - were escalated by the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt (1943-2009). The term itself was coined for a special 1996 issue of Social Text, a Duke University Press publication of postmodern critical theory, that featured multiple articles emphasizing the social construction of science. The dispute gained significant media interest because of the Sokal hoax, which generated unusually wide public interest and transformed what had been a specialized academic debate over the nature of truth and the boundaries of scientific authority into a broader public controversy. + +== Philosophers == + +=== Methods and justifications === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6e29df73d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of science" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:32.266326+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The origins of the philosophy of science as a field of inquiry distinct from epistemology extend back to Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) Novum Organum ("true directions concerning the interpretation of nature") and René Descartes' (1596-1650) Discourse on Method (full title: "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences") and then continue with the 2nd edition of Isaac Newton's (1643-1727) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and David Hume's (1711-1776) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in the 18th century. +19th-century scholars, including the philosopher and mathematician (and "father of sociology") Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916), frequently treated the history and philosophy of science as a single scholarly undertaking where the study of what science had been (its history) and what science ought to be (its methods and justifications) were productively intermingled. Comte and Mach were associated with the philosophical school of positivism, which also advanced ideas for the reform of history generally. "Historical" positivists argued that historians should pursue the objective truth of the past by allowing historical sources to "speak for themselves", without additional interpretation. The heavy emphasis placed by historical positivists on documentary sources led to the development of methods of source criticism, which seek to expunge bias and uncover original sources in their pristine state. +Under the influence of logical positivism in the early 20th century, the fields of philosophy of science and history of science began to separate. The philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) introduced a distinction between the "context of discovery" (e.g. how scientists come up with ideas) and the "context of justification" (i.e. how those ideas are justified). The latter was demarcated as the proper domain of philosophy while the former was assigned to the attention of historians who, "chary about using the historical record to address...questions...about the justification of science", agreed to the divorce. + +=== Paradigms === + +Although most contemporary science historians now completely eschew philosophy a small, but influential, handful of scholars emerged in the 1960s to challenge the increasing separation of the history of science from the philosophy of science. In the "hyper-influential" The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) introduced the idea of "paradigm shift" in science, which is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn wrote that while a given paradigm shift in science might occur for rational (or philosophic) reasons, at other times the shift happens for reasons that may have little to do with the objective merits of the science involved. By emphasizing the sociological nature of at least some paradigm shifts, however, Structure had the effect of distancing the history of science even further from philosophy. While Kuhn viewed himself as a philosopher-historian, the ironic impact of Structure was to even further exile philosophical questions from the practice of the history of science. +The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) argued that scientific knowledge is not cumulative or progressive and that there can be no demarcation in terms of method between science and any other form of investigation The philosopher of science Gerd Buchdahl (1914-2001) wrote that Kuhn and Joseph Agassi (1927-2023) had demonstrated that historiographical views greatly influence the writing of the history of science. In Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (1971), the philosopher of science Jerome Ravetz's (1929-) referred to the role of the scientific community, as a social construct, in accepting or rejecting (objective) scientific knowledge. + +== Historians == + +=== Professionalization === + +From its modest beginnings early in the century, the history of science became firmly institutionalized between the 1950s and 1970s through a rapid expansion of academic programs and departments. I. Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) was the first person to receive a PhD in the History of Science in the United States in 1947 but, by the 1970s, scores of PhDs were being awarded each year in the U.S. By the end of the century, the history of science possessed all the institutional paraphernalia of a mature discipline, including a panoply of professional associations, specialized journals, conferences and awards, even if its dedicated university departments remained fewer and smaller than those of more established disciplines. +Cohen received his undergraduate degree in mathematics before becoming a graduate student in the history of science. He considered the completion of the first completely new translation into English in almost two centuries of Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica to be his most important work. Other members of the first generation of professional historians of science followed a similar professional path (i.e. training first in the sciences). Alistair Crombie (1915–1996) earned a PhD in biology and zoology and worked for several years as a zoologist before pivoting to history. Charles Gillispie (1918–2015), who graduated with a degree in chemistry before earning his PhD in history, was the main editor of the massive (20 volume) Dictionary of Scientific Biography. + +=== Whig history === + +The historian and philosopher of history Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, a book which would later come to have an enormous impact on science historians. Butterfield invented the label of "whig history" for historical narratives which interpret past events in terms of the present. +Butterfield argued that writing history as a narrative of progress leads to the mistaken belief that the progressive sequence of events is "a line of causation", tempting the historian to go no further to investigate the causes of historical change. The focus on the present can also lead the historian to a special kind of "abridgement", selecting only those events that seem important from the present point of view or which serve the purposes of creating a narrative with "drama and apparent moral clarity". He also criticised it for modernising the past: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..feefebb8b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of science" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:32.266326+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +...the result [of whig history] is that to many of us [historical figures] seem much more modern than they really were, and even when we have corrected this impression by closer study we find it difficult to keep in mind the differences between their world and ours. +Whig history also easily lends itself to a view of history that is populated by heroes on the side of progress (or some other cherished modern value) while their confused or misguided opponents are portrayed, at best, as a "dummy that acts as a better foil to the grand whig virtues". +In place of a view of history as following some sort of inevitable or structural pattern, Butterfield urged historians to pay attention to the accidental and contingent nature of historical events and "to evoke a certain sensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'". + +=== Specialization === +Influenced by Butterfield, many of the professionalizing mid 20th-century historians of science saw the entire previous history of the history of science, written primarily by scientists, as a sustained centuries-long exercise in whiggism: + +By the mid-1970s, it had become commonplace among historians of science to employ the terms "Whig" and "Whiggish", often accompanied by one or more of "hagiographic", "internalist", "triumphalist", even "positivist", to denigrate grand narratives of scientific progress....post-WWII champions of the newly professionalized history of science...were out to establish a critical distance between the history of science and the teaching and promotion of the sciences. In particular, they were suspicious of the grand celebratory and didactic narratives of scientific discovery and progress... + +The professionalization of the history of science has been accompanied by a prodigious and proliferating specialization, with the field seeming to strive to match the protean diversity of modern science itself. Butterfield called such specialization "technical history", and he said it was the counterpart to "abridged" (whig) history. As the historian Roy Porter notes, "in specialization lies safety" (from whiggism). By restricting their inquiries to extremely specific and/or highly technical niches and producing micro-studies, science historians are almost guaranteed to make themselves invulnerable to charges of whiggism. But some observers, including Porter, warn that this defensive strategy may have a cost: + +...there are dangers too in the alternatives to Whig history. On the one hand looms the prospect of overspecialisation, narrowness and fragmentation. Few general historians are any longer prepared to chance their arm at writing the histories of whole societies over spans of centuries; and historians of science have caught the same disease. Even at the level of student textbooks, professional historians of science have ceased to write synoptic histories of science. +The historian William Cronon insists that "[a]bridgement - and with it, by Butterfield’s own argument, whiggish history - is inescapable": + +...without abridgement, there can be no history. Historians distill the nearly infinite records of the past in order to impose some semblance of order on what would otherwise feel like overwhelming chaos. This is all the more true when they seek to write for audiences other than their colleagues, whose patience for historical technicalities far surpasses that of the public. And because nonhistorians often do want to know how history relates to their own lives, there is no evading their demand for narratives that show how the present did indeed emerge from the past...Whenever historians seek to make their knowledge accessible to a wider world - whether in books, classrooms, museums, videos, websites, or blogs - they unfailingly abridge, simplify, analyze, synthesize, dramatize, and render judgments about why things happened as they did in the past, and why people should still care today. +Cronon says that "historians exist to explain the past to the present" and notes that Butterfield's own history of the Scientific Revolution "would seem to partake of at least a little whiggishness itself." + +== Sociologists == + +=== Constructionism === + +While earlier scholars had advocated to a greater or lesser extent for the importance of considering external (i.e. outside of science) and/or non-empirical and non-rational social factors when trying to explain when or where science happens, the emergence of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge ("SSK") in the 1970s extended, amplified and intensified the earlier debate by wholly embracing externalist explanations related to the social organization of scientific activity and arguing that scientific knowledge has no special epistemological status compared to ordinary, non-scientific knowledge: + +......what counts as knowledge in most social contexts it is tempting to call "customarily accepted belief". It is sustained by consensus and authority much as custom is sustained. It is developed and modified collectively, much as custom is developed and modified. This we might call the standard sociological conception of knowledge, the conception which both inspires and is confirmed by most of the empirical studies of knowledge undertaken in the social sciences. On inductive grounds one might expect this standard, widely applicable conception to make good sense of scientific knowledge and of the distinctions between knowledge and mere belief sustained and enforced by natural scientists. And so indeed it does. Scientific knowledge assimilates to the standard conception very readily, and much of profound importance can be discerned and understood when science is analysed in this way. But this is something that has only readily been acknowledged and accepted over the last two decades, and even now a sociological conception of scientific knowledge is still vigorously challenged and opposed... +While SSK-influenced sociologists do not deny the existence of "the real world", they do argue that reality is not "determinative" of what scientists believe. Instead these sociologists see science as "just another form of culture, rather than...something special and set apart" and scientific knowledge as something that is constructed rather than discovered. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..654c3b14e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of science" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:32.266326+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Science of sociology === +Just as sociologists have turned a skeptical eye on science, many scientists have returned the favor, accusing sociologists of deep ignorance about and hostility towards the field they are purporting to study, and a multi-generational intellectual laziness and complacency that has left their entire field unequipped to offer anything more than a primitive caricature of the vast intellectual landscape they have never bothered to map. + +== Terminology == +As early as the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910-1911), the word "science" had acquired an extremely broad meaning in English: + +...science may be defined as ordered knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them...The beginnings of physical science are to be sought in the slow and unconscious observation by primitive races of men of natural occurrences, such as the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies... + +More recently, the historian of computing R. Anthony Hyman (1928-2011) has warned against inappropriate use of the word "science": + +One may be reasonably clear what "science" means in the 19th century and most of the 18th century. In the 17th century "science" has very different meaning. Chemistry, for example, was then inextricably mixed up with alchemy. Before the 17th century dissecting out such a thing as "science" in anything like the modern sense of the term involves profound distortions. + +Similarly, the historian Scott Hendrix has argued that the word "science" as it is used by 21st century English speakers means modern science and that the use of the word to describe pre-modern scholars is misleading. "[E]ven an astute reader is prompted to classify intellectual exercises of the past as 'scientific'...based upon how closely those activities appear to mirror the activities of a modern scientist." Noting that natural philosophy was a far more neutral term than "science", Hendrix recommended that term be used instead when discussing pre-modern scholars of the natural world. "[T]here are sound reasons for a return to the use of the term natural philosophy that, for all its imprecision, reveals rather than imposes meaning on the past." +Confusion about the meaning of the word "science" has encouraged charges of "Eurocentrism" and complaints that the contributions of non-European civilizations to human knowledge of the natural world - Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese - have been marginalized. +The science historian Hendrik Floris Cohen proposed using the term nature-knowledge (natuurkennis in Dutch) as a more neutral term than either natural philosophy or science to describe the highly diverse approaches to understanding the natural world undertaken by different cultures: + + Instead, the unit of analysis I have in the end found myself working with is modes of nature-knowledge. By this I mean consistent ranges of distinct approaches to natural phenomena, which may differ in several dimensions. Their scope may have been comprehensive, with a view to deriving the whole wide world from first principles, or deliberately partial. The way in which knowledge was attained may have been predominantly empiricist or chiefly intellectualist. If any practices went with a given mode of nature-knowledge, these may have been observational, experimental, instrumental, etc. Knowledge may have been sought for its own sake or with a view to achieving certain practical improvements. Exchange may or may not have taken place between practitioners of distinct modes of nature-knowledge that were pursued at the same time and place. + +== See also == +The History and Present State of Electricity (1767) +Heroic theory of invention and scientific development +Isis (journal) +History of Science (journal) +The British Journal for the History of Science +James B. Conant +History of Science Society +Professionalization and institutionalization of history +Metascience +Sociology of the history of science +Strong programme + +== Citations == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c23f126a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +title: "Historiography of science" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:32.266326+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== References == +Agassi, Joseph. Towards an Historiography of Science Wesleyan University Press. 1963 +Bennett, J. A. (1997). "Museums and the Establishment of the History of Science at Oxford and Cambridge". British Journal for the History of Science. 30 (104 Pt 1): 29–46. doi:10.1017/s0007087496002889. PMID 11618881. S2CID 5697866. +Bowler, Peter J; Morus, Iwan Rhys (2005). Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-06861-9. Retrieved 2021-04-25. +Buchdahl, Gerd (1965). "A Revolution in Historiography of Science". History of Science. 4: 55–69. Bibcode:1965HisSc...4...55B. doi:10.1177/007327536500400103. S2CID 142838889. +Butterfield, Herbert (1965) [1931]. The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: WW Norton and Company. +Cronon, William (1 Sep 2012). "Two Cheers for the Whig Interpretation of History". Perspectives on History. American Historical Association. Retrieved 2026-04-30. +Dennis, Michael Aaron. "Historiography of Science: An American Perspective," in John Krige and Dominique Pestre, eds., Science in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997, pp. 1–26. +von Engelhardt, Dietrich. Historisches Bewußtsein in der Naturwissenschaft : von der Aufklärung bis zum Positivismus, Freiburg [u.a.] : Alber, 1979. +Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. +Gavroglu, Kostas. O Passado das Ciências como História, Porto: Porto Editora, 2007. +Golinski, Jan (2005) [1998]. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0226302324. +Graham, Loren R. (1985), "The socio-political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and he History of Science", Social Studies of Science, 15 (4), London: SAGE: 705–722, doi:10.1177/030631285015004005, S2CID 143937146. +Graham, Loren R. "Soviet attitudes towards the social and historical study of science," in Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 137–155. +Gross, Paul R.; Levitt, Norman (1997). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5707-2. Retrieved 2026-04-30. +Hart, Jenifer (1965). "Nineteenth-Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History". Past & Present (31): 39–61. doi:10.1093/past/31.1.39. ISSN 0031-2746. JSTOR 650101. According to its critics, a whig interpretation of history requires human heroes and villains in the story. +Kragh, Helge. An Introduction to the Historiography of Science, Cambridge University Press 1990 +Kuhn, Thomas S. (1996) [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-45808-3. +Lakatos, Imre. "History of Science and its Rational Reconstructions" in Y.Elkana (ed.) The Interaction between Science and Philosophy, pp. 195–241, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press and also published in Mathematics Science and Epistemology: Volume 2 of the Philosophical and Scientific Papers of Imre Lakatos Papers Imre Lakatos, Worrall & Currie (eds), Cambridge University Press, 1980 +Mayer, Anna K (2000). "Setting up a Discipline: Conflicting Agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee, 1936–1950". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 31 (4): 665–89. Bibcode:2000SHPSA..31..665M. doi:10.1016/s0039-3681(00)00026-1. PMID 11640235. +Mayer. "End of Ideology".'". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. 35: 2004. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2003.12.010. +Pestre, Dominique (1995). "Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences. Nouvelles définitions, nouveaux objets, nouvelles pratiques". Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 50 (3): 487–522. doi:10.3406/ahess.1995.279379. S2CID 162390064. +Popper, Karl R. (1962). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved 31 May 2023. +Porter, Roy (1990). "The history of science and the history of society". In Olby, R. C.; Cantor, G. N.; Christie, J. R. R.; Hodge, M. J. S. (eds.). Companion to the History of Modern Science. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415019880. +Raina, Dhruv. Images and Contexts Critical Essays on the Historiography of Science in India, Oxford University Press 2003 +Rossi, Paolo, I ragni e le formiche: un'apologia della storia della scienza, Bologna, 1986. +Swerdlow, Noel M. (1993), "Montucla's Legacy: The History of the Exact Sciences", Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (2): 299–328, doi:10.2307/2709984, JSTOR 2709984. +Schaffer, Simon (1984), "Newton at the crossroads", Radical Philosophy, 37: 23–38. +Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science +Wilson, Adrian; Ashplant, T. G. (2009-02-11). "Whig History and Present-centred History". The Historical Journal. 31 (1): 10. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00011961. ISSN 1469-5103. S2CID 159748098. + +== External links == + Media related to Historiography of science at Wikimedia Commons \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-0.md index a57492696..c64e5760b 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:34.466063+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:33.454256+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-1.md index 608fcdba8..0e0360e67 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:34.466063+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:33.454256+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-2.md index 83e828e1a..0c171fd33 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:34.466063+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:33.454256+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holomovement-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holomovement-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..08750be80 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holomovement-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +--- +title: "Holomovement" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holomovement" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:13.993666+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Holomovement is a theoretical concept proposed by physicist David Bohm to describe a dynamic and unbroken totality that underlies all of reality. It forms the foundation of Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics and his metaphysical model, particularly as articulated in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980). The holomovement integrates two key ideas: undivided wholeness and constant process. It suggests that everything in the universe is interconnected and in continual motion, with all forms and structures being temporary abstractions from this deeper, flowing unity. Critics have described holomovement as a type of metaphysical mysticism. + + +== Origins and background == +Louis de Broglie introduced a formalism for quantum mechanics at the 1927 Solvay Congress which explained quantum effects in terms of underlying processes such as a hypothesized pilot wave. This was met with strong criticism, particularly by Wolfgang Pauli, which caused de Broglie to abandon this suggestion. In 1952, Bohm revived the notion of a pilot wave guiding elementary particles in a way that withstood Pauli's criticism. Bohm and Basil Hiley criticized a solely epistemological model which only accounts for what can be known about physical processes; developing this pilot-wave theory into an ontological interpretation. +Bohm felt the extended version of this causal interpretation, particularly the notion of quantum potential, implied a "radically new notion of unbroken wholeness of the entire universe". In this wholeness, which he termed the holomovement, "all things found in the unfolded, explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which they are enfolded as potentialities and ultimately they fall back into it." +Bohm's dissatisfaction with mechanistic explanations in physics led him to propose a new worldview that emphasized interconnectedness and process. Influenced by his collaborations with Hiley and later F. David Peat, Bohm expanded his framework into a metaphysical model encompassing not only physical reality but also consciousness and cosmology. + + +== Core concepts == + + +=== Definition === +Bohm defines 'holomovement' as an "unknown and indescribable totality." He goes on to say: + +"Thus in its totality, the holomovement is not limited in any specifiable way at all. It is not required to conform to any particular order, or to be bounded by any particular measure. Thus, the holomovement is undefinable and immeasurable." + + +=== Undivided wholeness === +In the first essay of Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm introduces the idea of "undivided wholeness in flowing movement" as a paradigm shift from the fragmentary view of classical physics. He argues that all things are temporary abstractions from a continuous process of becoming, and that wholeness precedes the parts. Bohm's notion has been interpreted by scholars as a shift toward a process-based ontology grounded in quantum realism. + + +=== Implicate and explicate order === + +Bohm distinguishes between two orders of reality: the implicate (enfolded) order and the explicate (unfolded) order. The implicate order represents the hidden, generative structure of reality from which observable phenomena emerge. The holomovement is the ground from which the implicate and explicate orders arise, and into which they return. + + +=== All is flux === +Echoing the philosophy of Heraclitus, Bohm emphasizes that all reality is process: "All is flux." He contrasts this with the mechanistic view of isolated particles and static laws, proposing instead that process and movement are the primary realities. Bohm's emphasis on flux and interrelation has been compared to classical Chinese thought, including the processual logic of the Yijing (Book of Changes), which models reality in terms of instability and transformation. + + +== Applications and implications == +Bohm proposed, in a metaphysical extension of his quantum theory, that life and consciousness might emerge from the same implicate order that underlies physical processes. This view has been taken up in transpersonal psychology and speculative cosmology, but remains outside mainstream neuroscience. +Recent interpretations in integrative biology have extended the holomovement concept to propose models of "omni-local consciousness," suggesting that consciousness may be a fundamental and distributed property of the holofield. +The holomovement has also been invoked in spiritual and activist communities as a metaphor for collective awakening and planetary coherence, sometimes framing it as a foundation for a "new story" in sociocultural evolution. + + +== Reception and criticism == +Theckedath, in his review of The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory by D. Bohm, B. J. Hiley, criticized their characterization of holomovement as having two "poles", one mental and one physical. According to Theckedath, the mental pole adds an element of mysticism to the holomovement concept and separates holomovement from objective matter, creating a "notion of motion without matter". +Paavo Pylkkänen and Gordon Globus, have explored its potential relevance to mind-matter interactions and holistic neuroscience. In the field of religious studies, Wouter Hanegraaff has classified the holomovement as a "scientific myth" characteristic of New Age metaphysics. Nonetheless, it has inspired dialogues in fields such as systems theory, consciousness studies, and transpersonal psychology. +The holomovement has also been cited in speculative ethical frameworks concerning posthuman and extraterrestrial intelligences, where it serves as a basis for modeling universal interconnectivity and moral coherence. +Theologian Kevin J. Sharpe has proposed that Bohm's holomovement provides a viable framework for a non-dualistic metaphysical theology that preserves transcendence while allowing for dynamic immanence. Kabbalist and science scholar Jeffrey Gordon has argued that Bohm's concept of holomovement resonates with kabbalistic notions of divine unfolding, reflecting broader efforts to align mystical cosmologies with emerging scientific paradigms. Bohm's focus on vibratory enfoldment has also been compared to tantric meditative models in which primordial sound and vibration structure the unfolding of reality. + + +== See also == +Orchestrated objective reduction +Karl H. Pribram + + +== References == + + +=== Works cited === + + +== Further reading == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5b1d1fd3b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Holonomic brain theory" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:15.207716+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Holonomic brain theory is a branch of neuroscience investigating the idea that consciousness is formed by quantum effects in or between brain cells. Holonomic refers to representations in a Hilbert phase space defined by both spectral and space-time coordinates. Holonomic brain theory is opposed by traditional neuroscience, which investigates the brain's behavior by looking at patterns of neurons and the surrounding chemistry. +This specific theory of quantum consciousness was developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm building on the initial theories of holograms originally formulated by Dennis Gabor. It describes human cognition by modeling the brain as a holographic storage network. Pribram suggests these processes involve electric oscillations in the brain's fine-fibered dendritic webs, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials involving axons and synapses. These oscillations are waves and create wave interference patterns in which memory is encoded naturally, and the wave function may be analyzed by a Fourier transform. +Gabor, Pribram and others noted the similarities between these brain processes and the storage of information in a hologram, which can also be analyzed with a Fourier transform. In a hologram, any part of the hologram with sufficient size contains the whole of the stored information. In this theory, a piece of a long-term memory is similarly distributed over a dendritic arbor so that each part of the dendritic network contains all the information stored over the entire network. This model allows for important aspects of human consciousness, including the fast associative memory that allows for connections between different pieces of stored information and the non-locality of memory storage (a specific memory is not stored in a specific location, i.e. a certain cluster of neurons). + +== Origins and development == +In 1946 Dennis Gabor invented the hologram mathematically, describing a system where an image can be reconstructed through information that is stored throughout the hologram. He demonstrated that the information pattern of a three-dimensional object can be encoded in a beam of light, which is more-or-less two-dimensional. Gabor also developed a mathematical model for demonstrating a holographic associative memory. One of Gabor's colleagues, Pieter Jacobus Van Heerden, also developed a related holographic mathematical memory model in 1963. This model contained the key aspect of non-locality, which became important years later when, in 1967, experiments by both Braitenberg and Kirschfield showed that exact localization of memory in the brain was false. +Karl Pribram had worked with psychologist Karl Lashley on Lashley's engram experiments, which used lesions to determine the exact location of specific memories in primate brains. Lashley made small lesions in the brains and found that these had little effect on memory. On the other hand, Pribram removed large areas of cortex, leading to multiple serious deficits in memory and cognitive function. Memories were not stored in a single neuron or exact location, but were spread over the entirety of a neural network. Lashley suggested that brain interference patterns could play a role in perception, but was unsure how such patterns might be generated in the brain or how they would lead to brain function. +Several years later an article by neurophysiologist John Eccles described how a wave could be generated at the branching ends of pre-synaptic axons. Multiple of these waves could create interference patterns. Soon after, Emmett Leith was successful in storing visual images through the interference patterns of laser beams, inspired by Gabor's previous use of Fourier transformations to store information within a hologram. After studying the work of Eccles and that of Leith, Pribram put forward the hypothesis that memory might take the form of interference patterns that resemble laser-produced holograms. In 1980, physicist David Bohm presented his ideas of holomovement and Implicate and explicate order. Pribram became aware of Bohm's work in 1975 and realized that, since a hologram could store information within patterns of interference and then recreate that information when activated, it could serve as a strong metaphor for brain function. Pribram was further encouraged in this line of speculation by the fact that neurophysiologists Russell and Karen DeValois together established "the spatial frequency encoding displayed by cells of the visual cortex was best described as a Fourier transform of the input pattern." + +== Theory overview == + +=== Hologram and holonomy === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..60c183fab --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Holonomic brain theory" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:15.207716+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A main characteristic of a hologram is that every part of the stored information is distributed over the entire hologram. Both processes of storage and retrieval are carried out in a way described by Fourier transformation equations. As long as a part of the hologram is large enough to contain the interference pattern, that part can recreate the entirety of the stored image, but the image may have unwanted changes, called noise. +An analogy to this is the broadcasting region of a radio antenna. In each smaller individual location within the entire area it is possible to access every channel, similar to how the entirety of the information of a hologram is contained within a part. Another analogy of a hologram is the way sunlight illuminates objects in the visual field of an observer. It doesn't matter how narrow the beam of sunlight is. The beam always contains all the information of the object, and when conjugated by a lens of a camera or the eyeball, produces the same full three-dimensional image. The Fourier transform formula converts spatial forms to spatial wave frequencies and vice versa, as all objects are in essence vibratory structures. Different types of lenses, acting similarly to optic lenses, can alter the frequency nature of information that is transferred. +This non-locality of information storage within the hologram is crucial, because even if most parts are damaged, the entirety will be contained within even a single remaining part of sufficient size. Pribram and others noted the similarities between an optical hologram and memory storage in the human brain. According to the holonomic brain theory, memories are stored within certain general regions, but stored non-locally within those regions. This allows the brain to maintain function and memory even when it is damaged. It is only when there exist no parts big enough to contain the whole that the memory is lost. This can also explain why some children retain normal intelligence when large portions of their brain—in some cases, half—are removed. It can also explain why memory is not lost when the brain is sliced in different cross-sections.[5] + +Pribram proposed that neural holograms were formed by the diffraction patterns of oscillating electric waves within the cortex. Representation occurs as a dynamical transformation in a distributed network of dendritic microprocesses. There is a difference between the idea of a holonomic brain and a holographic one. Pribram does not suggest that the brain functions as a single hologram. Rather, the waves within smaller neural networks create localized holograms within the larger workings of the brain. This patch holography is called holonomy or windowed Fourier transformations. +A holographic model can also account for other features of memory that more traditional models cannot. The Hopfield memory model has an early memory saturation point before which memory retrieval drastically slows and becomes unreliable. On the other hand, holographic memory models have much larger theoretical storage capacities. Holographic models can also demonstrate associative memory, store complex connections between different concepts, and resemble forgetting through "lossy storage". + +=== Synaptodendritic web === +In classic brain theory the summation of electrical inputs to the dendrites and soma (cell body) of a neuron either inhibit the neuron or excite it and set off an action potential down the axon to where it synapses with the next neuron. However, this fails to account for different varieties of synapses beyond the traditional axodendritic (axon to dendrite). There is evidence for the existence of other kinds of synapses, including serial synapses and those between dendrites and soma and between different dendrites. Many synaptic locations are functionally bipolar, meaning they can both send and receive impulses from each neuron, distributing input and output over the entire group of dendrites. +Processes in this dendritic arbor, the network of teledendrons and dendrites, occur due to the oscillations of polarizations in the membrane of the fine-fibered dendrites, not due to the propagated nerve impulses associated with action potentials. Pribram posits that the length of the delay of an input signal in the dendritic arbor before it travels down the axon is related to mental awareness. The shorter the delay the more unconscious the action, while a longer delay indicates a longer period of awareness. A study by David Alkon showed that after unconscious Pavlovian conditioning there was a proportionally greater reduction in the volume of the dendritic arbor, akin to synaptic elimination when experience increases the automaticity of an action. Pribram and others theorize that, while unconscious behavior is mediated by impulses through nerve circuits, conscious behavior arises from microprocesses in the dendritic arbor. +At the same time, the dendritic network is extremely complex, able to receive 100,000 to 200,000 inputs in a single tree, due to the large amount of branching and the many dendritic spines protruding from the branches. Furthermore, synaptic hyperpolarization and depolarization remains somewhat isolated due to the resistance from the narrow dendritic spine stalk, allowing a polarization to spread without much interruption to the other spines. This spread is further aided intracellularly by the microtubules and extracellularly by glial cells. These polarizations act as waves in the synaptodendritic network, and the existence of multiple waves at once gives rise to interference patterns. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d62dba55f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Holonomic brain theory" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:15.207716+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Deep and surface structure of memory === +Pribram suggests that there are two layers of cortical processing: a surface structure of separated and localized neural circuits and a deep structure of the dendritic arborization that binds the surface structure together. The deep structure contains distributed memory, while the surface structure acts as the retrieval mechanism. Binding occurs through the temporal synchronization of the oscillating polarizations in the synaptodendritic web. It had been thought that binding only occurred when there was no phase lead or lag present, but a study by Saul and Humphrey found that cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus do in fact produce these. Here phase lead and lag act to enhance sensory discrimination, acting as a frame to capture important features. These filters are also similar to the lenses necessary for holographic functioning. +Pribram notes that holographic memories show large capacities, parallel processing and content addressability for rapid recognition, associative storage for perceptual completion and for associative recall. In systems endowed with memory storage, these interactions therefore lead to progressively more self-determination. + +== Recent studies == +While Pribram originally developed the holonomic brain theory as an analogy for certain brain processes, several papers (including some more recent ones by Pribram himself) have proposed that the similarity between hologram and certain brain functions is more than just metaphorical, but actually structural. Others still maintain that the relationship is only analogical. Several studies have shown that the same series of operations used in holographic memory models are performed in certain processes concerning temporal memory and optomotor responses. This indicates at least the possibility of the existence of neurological structures with certain holonomic properties. Other studies have demonstrated the possibility that biophoton emission (biological electrical signals that are converted to weak electromagnetic waves in the visible range) may be a necessary condition for the electric activity in the brain to store holographic images. These may play a role in cell communication and certain brain processes including sleep, but further studies are needed to strengthen current ones. Other studies have shown the correlation between more advanced cognitive function and homeothermy. Taking holographic brain models into account, this temperature regulation would reduce distortion of the signal waves, an important condition for holographic systems. See: Computation approach in terms of holographic codes and processing. + +== Criticism and alternative models == +Pribram's holonomic model of brain function did not receive widespread attention at the time, but other quantum models have been developed since, including brain dynamics by Jibu & Yasue and Vitiello's dissipative quantum brain dynamics. Though not directly related to the holonomic model, they continue to move beyond approaches based solely in classic brain theory. + +=== Correlograph === +In 1969 scientists D. Wilshaw, O. P. Buneman and H. Longuet-Higgins proposed an alternative, non-holographic model that fulfilled many of the same requirements as Gabor's original holographic model. The Gabor model did not explain how the brain could use Fourier analysis on incoming signals or how it would deal with the low signal-noise ratio in reconstructed memories. Longuet-Higgin's correlograph model built on the idea that any system could perform the same functions as a Fourier holograph if it could correlate pairs of patterns. It uses minute pinholes that do not produce diffraction patterns to create a similar reconstruction as that in Fourier holography. Like a hologram, a discrete correlograph can recognize displaced patterns and store information in a parallel and non-local way so it usually will not be destroyed by localized damage. They then expanded the model beyond the correlograph to an associative net where the points become parallel lines arranged in a grid. Horizontal lines represent axons of input neurons while vertical lines represent output neurons. Each intersection represents a modifiable synapse. Though this cannot recognize displaced patterns, it has a greater potential storage capacity. This was not necessarily meant to show how the brain is organized, but instead to show the possibility of improving on Gabor's original model. One property of the associative net that makes it attractive as a neural model is that good retrieval can be obtained even when some of the storage elements are damaged or when some of the components of the address are incorrect. P. Van Heerden countered this model by demonstrating mathematically that the signal-noise ratio of a hologram could reach 50% of ideal. He also used a model with a 2D neural hologram network for fast searching imposed upon a 3D network for large storage capacity. A key quality of this model was its flexibility to change the orientation and fix distortions of stored information, which is important for our ability to recognize an object as the same entity from different angles and positions, something the correlograph and association network models lack. + +== See also == +Gestalt psychology – Theory of perception +Orchestrated objective reduction – Theory of a quantum origin of consciousness +Quantum cognition – Application of quantum theory mathematics to cognitive phenomena +Quantum mysticism – Pseudoscience claiming to build on quantum mechanics +Self-organizing map – Machine learning technique useful for dimensionality reduction +Sparse distributed memory – Mathematical model of memory +Visual perception – Ability to interpret the surrounding environment using light in the visible spectrum + +== References == + +=== Works cited === +Bohm, David (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-7100-0971-2. +Pribram, Karl (1986). "Holonomic Brain Theory In Imaging And Object Perception". Acta Psychologica. 63 (1–3): 175–210. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(86)90062-4. PMID 3591432. +Pribram, Karl (1991). Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. + +== Further reading == +Aerts, Diedrick; Czachor, Marek; Sozzo, Sandro (2011). Privman, V.; Ovchinnikov, V. (eds.). Quantum Interaction Approach in Cognition, Artificial Intelligence, and Robots. IARIA, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Quantum, Nano and Micro Technologies. Brussels University Press. pp. 35–40. arXiv:1104.3345. +Mishlove, Jeffrey (1998). "The Holographic Brain: Karl Pribram, Ph.D. interview". TWM.co.nz. Archived from the original on 2006-05-18. Retrieved 2012-05-18. +Peruš, Mitja; Loo, Chu Kiong (2011). Biological And Quantum Computing For Human Vision: Holonomic Models And Applications. Medical Information Sciences Reference. ISBN 978-1615207855. +Pribram, Karl (1993). Rethinking Neural Networks: Quantum Fields And Biological Data. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and INNS Press. +Pribram, Karl (2007). "Holonomic brain theory". Scholarpedia. 2 (5). Washington, DC: Georgetown University: 2735. Bibcode:2007SchpJ...2.2735P. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.2735. +Pribram, Karl (2013). The Form Within. Prospecta Press. +Talbot, Michael (2011). The Holographic Universe. HarperCollins. + +== External links == +KarlPribram.com, hosts PDFs of Pribram's articles about HBT in English and Spanish \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8f362f0ec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Ingo Swann" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:50.545854+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Ingo Douglass Swann (September 14, 1933 – January 31, 2013) was an American psychic, artist, and author, whose claims of clairvoyance were investigated as a part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Stargate Project. Swann is credited as the creator of the term “Remote Viewing," a term which refers to the use of extrasensory perception to perceive distant persons, places, or events. + +== Early life == +Swann was born in Telluride, Colorado, on September 14th, 1933. Swann claimed to have out-of-body experiences beginning at three years of age, during a tonsil removal operation, after which he began to see colorful 'auras' around certain objects. These experiences continued throughout childhood, and eventually prompted Swann to volunteer as a participant in parapsychology research at the age of 37. + +== Remote viewing == +Swann was a prominent celebrity Scientologist during the 1970s having attained the level of Operating Thetan through Scientology auditing. It is purported that the attainment of the level may extend one’s psychic abilities including controlled out-of-body experiences, called "exteriorization" in Scientology. During this time, Swann demonstrated his exteriorization skills at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that would come to be known secularly as remote viewing. These experiments caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is commonly credited with proposing the idea of controlled remote viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing aside from its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding. + +== Uri Geller == +Due to the popularity of Uri Geller in the seventies, skeptics and historians basically overlooked a critical examination of Swann's paranormal claims. Uri Geller commented very favorably on Swann, saying, "If you were blind and a man appeared who could teach you to see with mind power, you would revere him as a guru. So why is Ingo Swann ignored by publishers and forced to publish his astounding life story on the Internet?" +Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two experimenters, tested Geller and Swann and concluded that they had unique skills. Others have strongly disputed the scientific validity of Targ and Puthoff's experiments. In a 1983 interview, magician Milbourne Christopher remarked that Swann was "one of the cleverest in the field". + +== Out-of-body experiment == +In 1972, in the newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), their director of research Karlis Osis described his personal controlled out-of-body (OOB) experiment with Swann. The targets that Swann was to attempt to describe and illustrate were on a shelf two feet from the ceiling and several feet above Swann's head. Osis did describe the height of the ceiling. Swann suggested that the ceiling was 14 feet tall. Two kitchen-style overhead fixtures illuminated the room. Swann sat alone in the chamber, wires from electrodes fastened to his head running through the wall behind him. Swann sat just beneath the target tray. He was given a clipboard to use for sketching. Any movement while drawing did not result in "artifacts" in the brain readout. In Swann's book To Kiss Earth Goodbye there is a photograph of the objects on the shelf. Swann wrote that he knew most of the objects on a shelf above his head, but he did not know it held four numbers on a side that would not have been visible if a reflecting surface had been angled near the end. +Psychological scales were developed to rate the quality and clarity (as subjectively described) of Swann's OOB vision, which varied from time to time. The results were evaluated by blind judging. A psychologist, Bonnie Preskari or Carole K. Silfen, was asked to match up Swann's responses without knowing which target they were meant. She matched all eight sessions. Osis stressed the odds of Swann being correct were forty thousand to one. There is no record of any experiments being performed in the dark. +Silfen and Swann prepared an unofficial report of later out-of-body experiments and circulated it to 500 members of the ASPR before the ASPR board was aware of it. According to Swann, Silfen had disappeared and could not be located. While searching for her, he also sought help from the general public. Swann claimed that in April 1972, the ASPR in New York attempted to discredit him and expel him due to his affiliation with Scientology. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a48354784 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Ingo Swann" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:50.545854+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Magnetometer psychokinesis tests == +When Swann arrived at SRI, Harold Puthoff decided he would first be tested for PK. On June 6, 1972, the two men visited Dr. Arthur Heberd and his quark detector, a magnetometer, at the Varian Physics Building. The well-shielded magnetometer had a small magnetic probe in a vault five feet beneath the floor. The oscillation ran silently for about an hour, tracing a stable pattern on the chart recorder. Puthoff asked Swann if he could affect the magnetometer's magnetic field. Swann said he focused his attention on the interior of the magnetometer and was getting nothing. +Then, there are different versions of the following events. Puthoff states that after about a five-second delay, Heberd says it was a ten- to fifteen-minute delay, the frequency of the trace recorder oscillation doubled for about 30 seconds, reportedly a common occurrence due to variations in the shared helium line to the laboratory. Heberd continued, and when the curve burped, Swann asked, "Is that what I am supposed to do?" Swann said he responded, "Is that an effect?" According to Heberd, Swann crossed the room, taking his attention away from the chart recorder. Swann said he took his mind off the machine and was sketching. Others watched the recorder to see if the irregularity would be repeated, and it was. Puthoff asked Swann, "Did you do that too?" Swann said he again responded, "Is that an effect?" According to Puthoff, Swann said he was then tired and couldn't "hold it any longer" and let go. The chart recorder pattern returned to normal. +More supportive sources say that Heberd supports Puthoff's version, and in the second instance, Heberd suggested he would be more impressed if Swann could stop the field change altogether. Heberd denies he told James Randi that he never suggested it. + Swann recalled he heard, "Can you do that again?" from Puthoff. Swann said his feats frightened some doctoral candidates, claiming that two "virtually ran" from the room and one collided with a "totally visible" structure support. +Puthoff writes Dr. Heberd suggested that the equipment must be wrong. The following day, it was certain the magnetometer was malfunctioning. "The equipment was behaving erratically; it was not possible to obtain a stable background signal for calibration." Therefore, the experiment was not repeated. Swann related this SNAFU in his book, Remote Viewing: The Real Story. In his CIA report, paranormal expert Dr. Kenneth A. Kress does not record anything about Heberd's malfunctioning suggestions. Kress writes, "These variations were never seen before or after this visit." Though Swann was to spend a year at SRI, in their book, Targ and Puthoff present no further data and, Swann did not mention he was involved in any other PK experiments with the magnetometer than those that occurred and were recorded on June 6, 1972. +Immediately after, Puthoff wrote a brief paper in a draft form. Rather than publishing the results in a scientific journal inviting peer review, this paper was circulated hand to hand throughout research and academic institutions across the US, and Puthoff accepted invitations to speak. This paper caught the attention of the CIA and two agents paid a visit to Hal Puthoff at SRI and also met Swann. Later this paper was published as a part of a conference proceedings. + +== Early Coordinate Remote Viewing experiments == +Targ and Puthoff write about their pilot experiments, "We couldn't overlook the possibility that perhaps Ingo knew the geographical features of the Earth and their approximate latitude and longitude. (It is Swann who suggests these Coordinate Remote Viewing tests, not the experimenters. He is in control.) "Or it was possible that we were inadvertently cueing the subject (Swann), since we as experimenters knew what the answers were." +Soon, Targ and Puthoff performed more experiments with Swann, and the controls were tightened to eliminate the possibility of error. This time Swann was given the latitude and longitude of ten targets, in the end there would be ten runs, for a total of 100. Only the evaluations of the ten targets from the tenth run, the last, were disclosed. The results of the targets from the previous ninety (runs 1–9) are ignored. Swann had seven hits for the tenth run, two neutral and one miss. The experiments came to a close. Targ and Puthoff were positive: "Something was happening, but they are not clear what it is." (This method of selecting a small number of "guesses" from a larger, sometimes never disclosed larger number, is known as the free response method in remote viewing but could be called cherry picking.) According to Swann and Stanford Research International, his RV was correct probably 95% of the time. His personally trained students' RV were 85% correct, 85% of the time. See: Stargate Project + +== Swann's descriptions of Jupiter == +Swann proposed a study to Targ and Puthoff. At first, they resisted, for the resulting descriptions would be impossible to verify. Yet, on the evening of 27 April 1973, Targ and Puthoff recorded Swann's remote viewing session of the planet Jupiter and Jupiter's moons, before the Voyager probe's visit there in 1979. +Swann asked for 30 minutes of silence. Swann said his ability to see Jupiter took about three and a half minutes. In the session, he made several reports on the physical features of Jupiter, such as its atmosphere and the surface of its core. Swann claimed to see bands of crystals in the atmosphere, which he likened to clouds and possibly like the rings of Saturn. The Voyager probe later confirmed the existence of the rings of Jupiter, although these rings are not in the planet's atmosphere. However, Swann's claim that crystals are present in the atmosphere is supported by observations by NASA's Galileo spacecraft of clouds of ammonia ice crystals in the northwest corner of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. +The following is Swann's version of his statements from 1995, 22 years after the 1973 experiments: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..acb5a9e32 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: "Ingo Swann" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:50.545854+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +[6:06:20] Very high in the atmosphere there are crystals ... they glitter. Maybe the stripes are like bands of crystals, maybe like rings of Saturn, though not far out like that. Very close within the atmosphere. [Unintelligible sentence.] I bet you they'll reflect radio probes. Is that possible if you had a cloud of crystals that were assaulted by different radio waves? +[6:08:00] Now I'll go down through. It feels really good there [laughs]. I said that before, didn't I? Inside those cloud layers, those crystal layers, they look beautiful from the outside. From the inside they look like rolling gas clouds – eerie yellow light, rainbows. +[6:10:20] I get the impression, though I don't see, that it's liquid. +[6:10:55] Then I came through the cloud cover. The surface – it looks like sand dunes. They're made of very large grade crystals, so they slide. Tremendous winds, sort of like maybe the prevailing winds of Earth, but very close to the surface of Jupiter. From that view, the horizon looks orangish or rose-colored, but overhead it's kind of greenish-yellow. +[6:12:35] If I look to the right there is an enormous mountain range. +[6:14:45] I feel that there's liquid somewhere. Those mountains are very huge but they still don't poke up through the crystal cloud cover. You know I had a dream once something like this, where the cloud cover was a great arc ... sweeps over the entire heaven. Those grains which make that sand orange are quite large. They have a polished surface and they look something like amber or like obsidian but they're yellowish and not as heavy. The wind blows them. They slide along. +[6:16:37] If I turn, the whole thing seems enormously flat. I mean, if I get the feeling that if a man stood on those sands, I think he would sink into them [laughs]. Maybe that's where that liquid feeling comes from. + +Swann's transcript contained in "Mind-Reach: Scientists Look at Psychic Ability" by Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff is slightly different from Swann's later version. There is no mention of sand and he also states, "I feel there is liquid some-where ... liquid like water." +Swann's total observations lasted for about 20 minutes. He did not mention any of the 95 moons of Jupiter. The raw data comprised only four pages, but according to Swann, the confirmatory data appeared throughout the published scientific and technical articles and papers. It was decided that all of these should be included to ensure that no scientific passage was inadvertently used out of context. The feedback data, therefore, amounted to about 300 pages. + +== Brain activity during remote viewing == +In November 2001, there was an article by Michael Persinger published in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences. The results with Swann suggested that there were associated measurable changes in brain activity during his remote viewing. There was bipolar electroencephalographic activity over the occipital, temporal, and frontal lobes. Persinger concluded that there was "significant congruence" between the stimuli and Swann's electroencephalographic activity. + +== Psychic detectives == +Swann reported that out of the twenty-five criminal cases he worked on between 1972 and 1979, twenty-two were flops, and three were successes. According to Swann, Gerard Croiset and Peter Hurkos were super sensitive sleuths. Authors Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi Ph.D., also a founder of the International Remote Viewing Association, wrote the Croiset and Hurkos cases were "pure bunk" in their 1991 book The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime. + +== Ufology == +Swann was a supporter of ufology and James W. Moseley's Saucer Smear newsletter. Swann, writing "in appreciation of 'Saucer Smear' and its Esteemed Editor", wrote that "although many of its readers might view 'Saucer Smear' merely as a droll ufology gossip rag, in the larger picture it is rather more accurately a profound 'window' opening up onto the sociology of ufology. Therefore its cumulative issues constitute a precious historical archive." +In his 1998 autobiography Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, Swann described his work with individuals in an unknown agency who study extraterrestrials (E.T.), his remote viewing of a secret E.T. base on the hidden side of the Moon and his "shocking" experience with a sexy scantily dressed female E.T. in a Los Angeles supermarket. He concludes that extraterrestrials are living on Earth in humanoid bodies. Swann deduces that there are many extraterrestrials, that many are "bio-androids", and that they are aware their only foes on Earth are psychics. Later, Swann and an individual known as "Mr. Axelrod" took a flight to an unknown northerly destination, deduced by Swann as possibly Alaska. Along with two "twin" bodyguards, Swann and Axelrod attempt to secretly watch a recurrent UFO appear and suck up the water of a lake. Mr. Axelrod discloses that the silent, growing, oscillating triangle is simultaneously scanning the area and eliminating any animals in the area and that the silent "beams" emanating from the object were "blasting deer or porcupines from the woods or something." The "twin" bodyguards come to the attention that they've been discovered, and the group is "attacked" by the UFO. Swann was thrown to safety by his colleagues and sustained a minor injury. + +== Publications == +The Great Apparitions of Mary - An Examination of Twenty-two Supranormal Appearances - Copyright 1996 by Ingo Swann - Printed by The Crossroad Publishing Company, 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017 +To Kiss Earth Good-bye: Adventures and Discoveries in the Nonmaterial, "Recounted by the Man who has Astounded Physicists and Parapsychologists Throughout the World". +Self-help books: +Everybody's Guide to Natural ESP: Unlocking the Extrasensory Power of Your Mind +Your Nostradamus Factor — Accessing Your Innate Ability to See Into the Future +Psychic sexuality: The bio-psychic "anatomy" of sexual energies +1979 Fiction. Star Fire. 0 7221 8303 8 +1980 book on future world events: What Will Happen to You When the Soviets Take Over? +Autobiography: Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy (1998). + +== See also == +The Men Who Stare at Goats + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Buchanan, Lyn, The Seventh Sense: The Secrets Of Remote Viewing As Told By A "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military, ISBN 0-7434-6268-8 +Fabreguettes, Benoit, and Masotti, Laurent, Awaken Your Intuition: The ABCs of Remote Viewing, BookBaby, 2022, ISBN 978-1-66786-810-3 +McMoneagle, Joseph, The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, Hampton Roads 2002, ISBN 1-57174-225-5 +Ronson, Jon, The Men Who Stare at Goats Simon & Schuster, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-4192-4. The military budget cuts after Vietnam and how it all began. +Schnabel, Jim, Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies, Dell, 1997, ISBN 0-440-22306-7 +Smith, Paul H, Reading the Enemy's Mind : Inside Star Gate—America's Psychic Espionage Program, Forge Books 2005, ISBN 0-312-87515-0 +Swann, Ingo, Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy, Ingo Swann Books, 1998 Ingo Swann | AlienZoo.com + +== External links == +Ingo Swann at IMDb +Official Website, run by his Niece Elly Flippen +BioMindSuperPowers.com: Superpowers of +Rviewer.com: Swann's research work +Ingo Swann speaks on YouTube +BioMindSuperPowers.com Archived 8 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine Swann's reworked (12 Sept 1996) presentation to the Members of the Society for Enlightenment and Transformation at the United Nations. Delivered 21 Mar 1994. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..054eab12a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_the_Study_of_the_Jewish_Question" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:40.921593+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question (German: Institut zum Studium der Judenfrage) was founded in 1934 and was affiliated with the Reich Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels. In 1939 the institution was called "Anti-Semitic Action" (Antisemitische Aktion) and from 1942 "Anti-Jewish Action" (Antijüdische Aktion). +The institute was founded in 1934 by Eberhard Taubert on behalf of the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Originally, the institute was to be a joint research center against Judaism, Freemasonry and liberalism, but soon the tasks were separated. From the beginning, the Propaganda Ministry tried to camouflage the institute's affiliation with the government, since negative foreign policy consequences were feared. + + +== See also == +Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life +Institute for Research on the Jewish Question +German Christians (movement) +Eberhard Taubert +Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_(oculist)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_(oculist)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7bbec83ff --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_(oculist)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "John Taylor (oculist)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_(oculist)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:57.646686+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +John Taylor (c. 1703 – 1770 or 1772) was an early British eye surgeon, self-promoter and medical charlatan of 18th-century Europe. He was responsible for the surgical mistreatment of George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and perhaps hundreds of others. Both Handel and Bach died shortly after the botched surgery performed by Taylor. + + +== Career == +Taylor was born in Norwich, possibly in 1703. He was the son of a surgeon named John Taylor, who died in 1709. He studied in London under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden at St Thomas' Hospital, and by 1727 had produced a book, An Account of the Mechanism of the Eye, dedicated to Cheselden. +While his practice grew, operating on celebrities of the time such as Edward Gibbon, making the acquaintance of Viennese courtier and patron of composers Gottfried van Swieten, and being appointed royal eye surgeon to King George II, his flair for self-promotion grew with it, then beyond it. Taylor later claimed that during his visit to Marseille in 1734 he stimulated Jacques Daviel (the initiator of cataract extraction as opposed to couching) to pursue ophthalmic practice seems to be supported by contemporaneous evidence. Taylor dubbed himself "Chevalier", though the source of his title (equivalent to "knight" in English) is questionable, and his claims to be from an aristocratic family were false. Taylor was not ennobled until 1755, by Pope Benedict XIV. Taylor toured Europe in a coach painted with images of eyes, performing the ancient technique of couching cataracts and other techniques in something like an eye surgery travelling medicine show, with claims, treatments, and payments coordinated for an easy exit out of town. In his expansive 1761 autobiography in two volumes, The Life and Extraordinary History of the Chevalier John Taylor, Taylor styled himself "Ophthalmiater (sic) Pontifical, Imperial, Royal." +Taylor's career was destructive. His general approach included bloodletting, laxatives, and eyedrops of blood from slaughtered pigeons, pulverized sugar, or baked salt. In late March 1750, during one of his European tours, Taylor operated on Bach's cataracts twice in Leipzig and reportedly blinded him. Bach fell ill with a fever and died less than four months later. There is some evidence that Taylor operated on Handel in August 1758, in Tunbridge Wells, after which Handel's health deteriorated until his death in April 1759. In both cases Taylor claimed complete success. Prior to performing each surgical procedure, he would deliver a long, self-promoting speech in an unusual oratorial style. Dutch ophthalmologist R. Zegers mentions that "after his training, Taylor started practicing in Switzerland, where he blinded hundreds of patients, he once confessed". Writer Samuel Johnson said of Taylor that his life showed "an instance of how far impudence may carry ignorance." +The time and place of Taylor's death are uncertain. The musicologist Charles Burney claimed that he died on the morning of Friday 16 November 1770 in Rome, also claiming to have "dined with him at my table d'hote a few days before his death". He was also said to have died in Paris. In June and July 1772, newspapers in Germany and England reported that he recently died at a convent in Prague, completely blind, after having suffered from amaurosis. This version of the story was supported by Taylor's grandson John Taylor. + + +== See also == +William Read +Joshua Ward + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Albert, Daniel M.; Henkind, Paul (1993). "John Taylor: 1703–1772". Men of Vision: Lives of Notable Figures in Ophthalmology. Philadelphia: Saunders. pp. 41–49. ISBN 0-7216-4512-7. +Albert, Daniel M. (2011). Chevalier John Taylor: England's Early Oculist: Pretender or Pioneer?. Madison, WI: Parallel Press. ISBN 978-1-934795-32-3. +Wright, A. Dickson (1957). "Quacks Through the Ages". Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. 105 (4995): 161–178. JSTOR 41368549. +Carlyle, E. Irving (1898). "Taylor, John (1703–1772)". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 55. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. pp. 441–442. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6798e717d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Karl H. Pribram" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:04.515998+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Karl Harry Pribram ([ˈpr̝̊iːbram]) (February 25, 1919 – January 19, 2015) was an American-Austrian researcher in the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, holonomic brain theory, and holographic consciousness. He was a professor at Georgetown University and an emeritus professor at Stanford University at the time of his death. Before moving to Georgetown, he was the James P. and Anna King Distinguished Professor at Radford University. He was best known for his work on the holonomic brain theory. + +== Major Contributions == + +=== Cognitive revolution in psychology === +Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960), co-written with George Armitage Miller and Eugene Galanter, is widely credited as a seminal work in the development of the field of cognitive psychology. This work fueled the cognitive revolution, which established cognitive psychology as the dominant trend in psychology, replacing behaviorism. + +=== Emotional processes and the limbic system === +In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pribram became "recognized for pioneering research defining the boundaries of the limbic system." Through more than 50 surgical experiments, Pribram's laboratory was able to establish that the limbic system, governing emotions, also interacted with the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, governing personality, decision making, and social behavior. He discovered the "sensory specific" functions of the Association cortex, revealing that these systems organize the choices we make among sensory inputs, which supports higher order cognitive processes, such as perception, language and thought. +In 1958, Pribram coined the term "the Four F's" ("Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Sex") to describe the functions of the fronto-limbic system (the limbic system including the pre-frontal and association cortex). Additionally, through extensive laboratory testing with primates, Pribram and his students discovered that removal of the amygdala from these systems affected this set of behaviors, resulting in reset of hierarchical relationships within the group. + +=== Sensory processes and memory === +Pribram's work Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing (1991) conveyed his theory, based on experimental evidence, that sensory perception, along with memory storage and retrieval, is processed through dendritic fields, in a manner similar to quantum field theory. +Pribram describes his discovery, through extensive experiments with graduate students Mortimer Mishkin, John Robert Anderson, and Leslie Ungerleider, of the importance of the inferior temporal cortex's role in vision. Until this discovery, the temporal lobe was thought to be devoted to hearing. +In Brain and Perception, Pribram also addresses the longstanding question of whether brain functions are distributed or localized. He "emphasizes the fact that both distributed (holistic) and localized (structural) processes characterize brain function." He further analyzes wave-type input received by our senses (touch, taste, smell, sound and sight) through lens-like receptors (e.g., the cochlea for sound waves). +Pribram provides models of his experimental data, developed with the Japanese mathematical physicists Kunio Yasue and Mari Jibu, in order to demonstrate how we receive, perceive, and retrieve information from the outside world ("navigate" our world). + +=== Holonomic model === + +Karl Pribram first explored the metaphor of information storage in the brain as a hologram in his Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology (1971). In a 1974 review of Languages, in Behavioral Science Journal, R.P McDermott and Laurence Mucciolo stated "The book's contribution to neuropsychology will be hailed, developed and disputed for years to come." +Pribram's holonomic model of brain processing is further developed in Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing (1991), which contains the extension of his work with David Bohm, as well as numerous quantum and mathematical physicists. This theory - derived from 40 years of laboratory experiments and hundreds of tests - demonstrates the following: that certain brain processes, such as memory, do not take place solely through the axons, synapses, or reflex-type actions but rather through a concerted, ever-changing process that operates similarly to quantum field theory. Processing occurs in the neuron's felt-like fields of fine-fibered dendrites (branches), as well as in the dynamic electrical fields that surround these dendrites. +Hence, Karl Pribram's holonomic brain theory demonstrates that some brain processes are distributed (non-localized) in the form of interference wave patterns, and can interact on a quantum level. Pribram based his initial theory on the Fourier Transform, which enables one to analyze any repeated wave-form. After numerous conversations with Nobel Laureate Gábor Dénes [Dennis Gabor] inventor of holography, Pribram expanded his model to incorporate Gabor's holographic model of information storage into Pribram's holonomic theory of brain processing. + +=== The past and future of brain research === +Pribram's last important publication, published two years before his death, is The Form Within: My Point of View (2013). In this scientific memoir, Pribram describes 200 years of the interrelationships among the fields of brain research, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, coupled with his personal insights derived from 75 years of active participation in all of these fields. Pribram shares his hands-on research, as well as his publications with colleagues over the decades, and his intimate interactions with well-known figures in philosophy, psychology, physics, and neuroscience, including: Nobel Laureates Sir John Eccles, Ilya Prigogine, Dennis Gabor, Francis Crick, Hubel and Wiesel; and scientists such as B. F. Skinner, Wolfgang Kohler, Karl Lashley, Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria, Eugene Sokolov, David Bohm, and many others. +The Form Within is widely regarded as a tour de force in the history of brain research, described by the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience as, "... an amazingly clear, voluminously detailed, yet easily accessible description of [Pribram's] experiments over the past seven decades in neurocognition by man and animals." + +== Career == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..29c839921 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Karl H. Pribram" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:04.515998+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Private practice and Yerkes === +In the 1940s, Pribram became one of the first 300 board-certified neurosurgeons in the world after receiving his MD from University of Chicago at the age of 22. +During his education and residency, he studied under or collaborated with such luminaries as Anton Carlson, Ralph Gerard, Percival Bailey, and Warren McCullock. At Chicago Memorial Hospital Pribram was the first resident under Paul Bucy, the pioneer in the study of the temporal lobe, which later influenced Pribram's discoveries in that field. Bucy arranged for Pribram to complete his residency with Eric Oldberg, the last of Harvey Cushing's residents who received individual training by Cushing. +Throughout his life, Pribram would engage in pioneering work on the definition of the limbic system, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory-specific association cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes, and the classical motor cortex of the human brain. +During his first ten years of residency and as a practicing brain surgeon in Memphis, TN, and Jacksonville, FL, Pribram became concerned about the then-accepted practice of lobotomy and set out to discover the true function of the frontal lobes, which was unknown at that time. This quest led Pribram into the field of brain research, which resulted in the discovery that the frontal lobes are the critical "executors" of the brain. +While still in private practice as a surgeon in Florida, Pribram simultaneously offered his services to Karl Lashley at the Yerkes Primate Center (Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology), and there continued his research into the relationship between brain function and mental processes. Lashley shared techniques and disciplines in the field of experimental psychology, while Pribram "added neurosurgical sophistication" and sterility practices to the field of primate neurological research. Pribram's colleagues at Yerkes included Roger Sperry and Donald Hebb. Shortly after the end of WWII, Pribram succeeded Lashley as director of Yerkes; under his tenure the field of animal neuropsychology expanded and flourished. +These early years would prove to be influential in Pribram's development of theories about the structure of the brain and related mental processes. Two of the earliest discoveries Pribram made while at Yerkes were as follows: 1) the relationship between the frontal cortex (personality, decision making, and social behavior) and the limbic forebrain (emotions); and 2) the functions of the posterior cortex (visual processing, spatial reasoning, and memory). + +=== Yale University and the Institute of Living (1948-1959) === +In 1948, Pribram was invited by Professor John Fulton (author of Physiology of the Nervous System) to join the Department of Physiology at Yale University. Pribram began his research there focusing on understanding the functions of the inferior temporal lobe. This research led to Pribram's discoveries about the relationship between the anterior frontal cortex (decision-making and complex problem-solving) and the limbic forebrain (sensory processing). His colleagues, collaborators, and graduate students at Yale included Allan Mirsky, Hal Rosvold, Paul Maclean, Lawrence Kruger, Robert Livingston, and James Stevenson. +Additionally, Pribram worked with Wolfgang Köhler (Swarthmore/Dartmouth) to test Kohler's hypothesis of Direct Current as the basis for cortical processing. Pribram was able to demonstrate that there was indeed a Direct Current shift during visual (and auditory) stimulation. +While at Yale, Pribram established and directed the Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Institute of Living in Hartford, which "became a mecca for students intensely interested in the relationship between brain and behavior." As Director of the Psychophysiology Laboratory, Pribram would conduct some of the earliest research on brain circuitry. The years of this laboratory under Pribram's leadership has been called "The Golden Age of Primate Neuropsychology." +During this time, Pribram also established relationships with psychologists at Harvard University and "learned a great deal from S.S. Stevens, Gary Boring, and Georg von Bekesy." Additionally, Pribram noted that his collaboration with B.F. Skinner at Harvard, "led to a decade of primate operant conditioning experiments, which developed into subsequent research in cognitive neuropsychology." Pribram's further interactions and experiments with behavioral scientists ultimately led him to develop new areas of research that went beyond behaviorism, and looked instead to "the new neurology… a cognitive science which paid heed to the brain's control over its own input from the senses." This expanded approach to cognitive science is detailed in Plans and the Structure of Behavior (Galanter, Miller, Pribram, 1960), launching the "Cognitive Revolution." +Among his students at that time were Lawrence Weiskrantz, Walter Freeman III and Mortimer Mishkin. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..820e56beb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: "Karl H. Pribram" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:04.515998+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Stanford University (1959-1989) === +After his tenure at Yale, Pribram moved to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. For the next 30 years he taught neurophysiology and physiological psychology at Stanford with joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry (Medical School Faculty) and of Psychology (Arts and Sciences Faculty). +During this time, Pribram pioneered the field of neuropsychology, leading groundbreaking research into the interrelations of the brain, behavior, and cognition. +At Stanford, a part-time secretary, Barbara Honegger, filed a complaint alleging that Pribram had "denied [her] a job rank she was entitled to" while further alleging that Pribram had "struck her in the head." Pribram was placed on temporary probation by Stanford, while Honegger received a parting out-of-court settlement from the school. +While a professor at Stanford, with joint appointments in the departments of Psychology and Psychiatry, Pribram was honored with a Lifetime Grant from the US Office of Naval Research as well as a Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health. +Upon becoming emeritus at Stanford University, Pribram accepted the position of the James P. and Anna King Distinguished Professor at Radford University and, in 1989, was appointed Eminent Scholar of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Radford built the Center for Brain Research and Informational Sciences (B.R.A.I.N.S.) for Pribram to direct with the support of Alastair Harris, chair of the psychology department. +After 60 years of leading research and development in the field of brain research, Pribram was appointed Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Georgetown University in 1998. Simultaneously, he was appointed Distinguished Professor in the Engineering and Computer Science Department at George Mason University. + +== Influence on other researchers == +Over fifty doctoral and fifty postdoctoral fellows were trained in the neuropsychological laboratories at Yale and Stanford under Pribram's direction. +During Pribram's tenure at Yale, while simultaneously directing the Psychophysiology Laboratory at the Institute for Living, many young researchers were able to explore the importance of utilizing psychology combined with neurophysiology, including Lawrence Weiskrantz (Harvard) and Mortimer Mishkin (McGill). +At Stanford, Leslie Ungerleider (noted experimental psychologist and neuroscientist) was among those who made major contributions. + +== Accolades == +Karl Pribram was the recipient of more than seventy major international awards and honors, including a Lifetime Grant from the US Office of Naval Research, the Lifetime Research Career Award from the National Institutes of Health, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychology, the Award for Distinguished Career in Science from the Washington Academy of Sciences, the Neural Network Leadership Award from the International Neural Network Society, and the Outstanding Contributions Award from the American Board of Medical Psychotherapists. +He was granted an Honorary Doctorate in Psychology from the University of Montreal, Canada, and an Honorary Doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of Bremen, Germany. +Pribram was presented the inaugural Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award (The VIZE 97 Prize) in 1999 for uniting the sciences and the humanities. The award was created to honor significant individuals whose work transcends the conventional framework of scientific understanding. Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, declared, "[Pribram] is an example to people of different fields and orientations, such as neurologists, psychologists, mathematicians, scientists and philosophers. It is a wonder to see people from all over the world united by one purpose when so often the world is divided by distrust and small disparities." + +=== Selected Honors and Awards === +Source: + +Lifetime Grant, US Office of Naval Research +Lifetime Research Career Award, National Institutes of Health (1962) +Lifetime Achievement Award, Society of Experimental Psychology +President of the International Neuropsychological Society (1967) +American Psychological Association +Division of Physiological and Comparative Psychology (President, 1967–1968) +Division of Theological and Philosophical Psychology (President, 1979–1980) +Menfred Sakel Award, Society for Biological Psychiatry (1976) +Realia Honor, Institute for Advanced Philosophic Research (1986) +Outstanding Contributions Award, American Board of Medical Psychotherapists (1990) +Honorary Ph.D. in psychology, University of Montreal, Canada (1992) +Neural Network Leadership Award, International Neural Network Society (1994) +Honorary Ph.D. in neuroscience, University of Bremen, Germany (1996) +The Noetic Medal of Consciousness & Brain Research (1998) +First recipient of the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Award: The VIZE 97 Prize (1999) +Culver Man of the Year, Culver Military Academy (2000) +Award for Distinguished Career in Science, Washington Academy of Sciences (2010) + +== In popular culture == + +=== The Holographic Universe === + +Michael Talbot opened the acknowledgements section of his work with the note, "David Bohm, Ph.D., and Karl Pribram, Ph.D., who were generous with both their time and their ideas, and without whose work this book would not have been written." + +=== The Aquarian Conspiracy === +Marilyn Ferguson summarized and interpreted Karl Pribram's holonomic model of brain processing in her popular book, The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980). In the book she also describes how Pribram's son, John Pribram, Ph.D., introduced him to the work of David Bohm, leading to the further development of Pribram's holonomic brain theory. Additionally, Ferguson produced the Brain/Mind Bulletin, a science newsletter dedicated to sharing cutting-edge research from prominent scientists and theorists including Pribram, Bohm, and Prigogine. + +=== SyberVision === +Steve DeVore, the founder of SyberVision, worked as a research assistant to Pribram at Stanford, where he would investigate the function of mirror neurons. Together they published The Neuropsychology of Achievement which proposed the concept of creating an "image of achievement" to attain one's goals. + +=== Feldenkrais Foundation === +While at Stanford, Pribram was introduced to Dr. Moshé Feldenkrais, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method. Pribram would later visit Feldenkrais' training program in California where they engaged in a series of conversations focused on the holographic and dynamic qualities of brain functioning. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a34eb8373 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Karl H. Pribram" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_H._Pribram" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:04.515998+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Selected books == +Hamburg, D. A., Pribram, K. H., and Stunkard, A. J. (Eds.) (1970) Perception and Its Disorders. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. +Hyden, H., Lorenz, K., Magoun, H.W., Penfield, W., and Pribram, K.H. (Eds) (1969) On the Biology of Learning. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. +King, J. S., and Pribram, K.H., (Eds.) (1995) Scale in Conscious Experience: Is the Brain Too Important to be Left to Specialists to Study?, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ISBN 0-8058-2178-3 +Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., and Pribram, K. H. (1960) Plans and the Structure of Behavior. New York: Henry Holt, 1960. (Russian trans; also in Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian.) ISBN 0-03-010075-5 +Isaacson, R. L., and Pribram, K. H. (Eds.) (1975) The Hippocampus, Volumes I and II. New York: Plenum. ISBN 0-306-37535-4 +Isaacson, R. L., and Pribram, K. H. (Eds.) (1986) The Hippocampus, Volumes III and IV. New York: Plenum. +Pribram, K. H., and Broadbent, D. (Eds.) (1970) Biology of Memory. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-564350-0 +Pribram, K. H., and Gill, M. M. (1976) Freud's `Project' Re-Assessed: Preface to Contemporary Cognitive Theory and Neuropsychology. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02569-2 +Pribram, K.H., and King, J.S. (Eds.) (1996) Learning as Self-Organization. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ISBN 0-8058-2586-X +Pribram, K. H., and Luria, A. R. (Eds.) (1973) Psychophysiology of the Frontal Lobes. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-564340-3 +Pribram, K.H., and Ramirez, J.M. (1980) Cerebro, Mente y Holograma. Madrid: Alhambra. +Pribram, K. H. (Ed.) (1969) Brain and Behavior, Volumes I-IV. London: Penguin, Ltd. ISBN 0-14-080521-4 +Pribram, K. H. (1971) What Makes Man Human. (39th James Arthur Lecture on the Evolution of the Human Brain, 1970). New York: American Museum of Natural History. +Pribram, K. H. (1971) Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1977; New York: Brandon House, 1982. (Translations in Russian, Japanese, Italian, Spanish) +Pribram, K. H. (Ed.) (1974) Central Processing of Sensory Input. The Neurosciences: Third Study Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. +Pribram, K. H. (1991) Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ISBN 978-0-89859-995-4 +Pribram, K.H. (Ed.) (1993) Rethinking Neural Networks: Quantum Fields and Biological Data. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ISBN 0-8058-1466-3 +Pribram, K.H. (Ed.) (1994) Origins: Brain & Self Organization. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ISBN 978-1-138-87652-1 +Pribram, K.H. (1995) Cerebro Y Conciencia. Madrid, Spain: Diaz de Santos. +Pribram, K.H. (Ed.) (1998) Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-3154-1 +Pribram, K.H. (2013) The Form Within. Prospecta Press. ISBN 978-1-935212-80-5 + +== References == + +== External links == +Karl Pribram's Website karlpribram.com +Karl Pribram, MD interviewed by Howard Kaufman, MD (American Association of Neurological Surgeons) +Meeting of the Minds: Interview with Karl Pribram +Photos of Karl Pribram with friends and colleagues (KatherineNeville.com) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b745245fd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Kenneth O. May Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O._May_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:15.517128+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Kenneth O. May Prize and Medal in history of mathematics is an award of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM) "for the encouragement and promotion of the history of mathematics internationally". It was established in 1989 and is named in honor of Kenneth O. May, the founder of ICHM. Since then, the award is given every four years, at the ICHM congress. + + +== Kenneth O. May Prize winners == +Source: (1989-2005) A Brief History of the Kenneth O. May Prize + +2025: Jan Hogendijk and David E. Rowe +2021: Sonja Brentjes and Christine Proust +2017: Eberhard Knobloch and Roshdi Rashed +2013: Menso Folkerts and Jens Høyrup +2009: Ivor Grattan-Guinness and Radha Charan Gupta +2005: Henk J. M. Bos +2001: Ubiratàn D'Ambrosio and Lam Lay Yong +1997: René Taton +1993: Christoph Scriba and Hans Wussing +1989: Dirk Struik and Adolph P. Yushkevich + + +== See also == +List of history awards +List of mathematics awards + + +== References == + +A Brief History of the Kenneth O. May Prize in the History of Mathematics +BLC Newsletter August 2009 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7ca1628fc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Leonardo da Vinci Medal" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_Medal" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:11.995311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Leonardo da Vinci Medal is the highest award of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and was first given in 1962. In general this award is granted annually to scholars who have contributed outstandingly to the history of technology through research, teaching, publication or other activities. The prize consists of a certificate and a medal. +The medal is a circular bronze medallion designed by the Hungarian expressionist sculptor András Beck. The face depicts the head of Leonardo da Vinci based on one of his self-portraits and the reverse depicts "the basic sources of energy (water, wind, and fire)," in the sculptor's words. + + +== List of recipients == + + +== References == + + +== External links == +The Leonardo da Vinci Medal – Society for the History of Technology \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2b9a86dc4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 1/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +This is a non-exhaustive list of alternative treatments that have been promoted to treat or prevent cancer in humans but which lack scientific and medical evidence of effectiveness. In many cases, there is scientific evidence that the alleged treatments are not effective, and in some cases, may even be harmful. Unlike accepted cancer treatments, treatments lacking in evidence of efficacy are generally ignored or avoided by the medical community and are often pseudoscientific. Many alternative cancer treatments are considered disproven because they have been investigated with clinical trials and have been shown to be ineffective. + +== Alternative health systems == +Aromatherapy – the use of fragrant substances, such as essential oils, in the belief that smelling them will positively affect health. There is some evidence that aromatherapy improves general well-being, but it has also been promoted for its ability to fight diseases, including cancer. The American Cancer Society states "available scientific evidence does not support claims that aromatherapy is effective in preventing or treating cancer". +Ayurvedic medicine – a 2,200-year-old system of traditional medicine which originated on the Indian subcontinent. According to Cancer Research UK, "There is no scientific evidence to prove that Ayurvedic medicine can treat or cure cancer." +Germanic New Medicine – a popular medical system devised by Ryke Geerd Hamer (1935–2017), in which all disease is seen as deriving from emotional shock and mainstream medicine is regarded as a conspiracy promulgated by Jews. There is no evidence to support its claims and no biological reason why it should work. +Greek cancer cure – A putative cancer cure invented and promoted by microbiologist Hariton-Tzannis Alivizatos. It consisted of intravenous injections of a fluid for which Aliviatos would not reveal the formula. The American Cancer Society concluded that "there is no evidence that any aspect of the diagnostic test nor the treatment [...] [is] effective in the treatment of cancer." In addition they state "Nor is there any evidence that.. the intravenous injections are safe." +Herbalism – a whole-body approach to promoting health, in which substances are derived from entire plants so as not to disturb what herbalists believe is the delicate chemistry of the plant as a whole. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is currently no strong evidence from studies in people that herbal remedies can treat, prevent or cure cancer". +Holistic medicine – a general term for an approach to medicine which encompasses mental and spiritual aspects, and which is manifested in sundry complementary and alternative methods. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that these complementary and alternative methods, when used without mainstream or conventional medicine, are effective in treating cancer or any other disease". +Homeopathy – a pseudoscientific system of medicine based on ultra-diluted substances. Some proponents promote homeopathy as a cancer cure; however, according to the American Cancer Society "there is no reliable evidence showing that homeopathic remedies can treat cancer in humans". +Native American healing – shamanistic forms of medicine traditionally practiced by some indigenous American peoples and which have been claimed as being capable of curing human diseases, including cancer. The American Cancer Society say that while its supportive, community aspects might improve general well-being, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that Native American healing can cure cancer or any other disease". +Naturopathy – a system of alternative medicine based on a belief in energy forces in the body and an avoidance of conventional medicine; it is promoted as a treatment for cancer and other ailments. According to the American Cancer Society, "scientific evidence does not support claims that naturopathic medicine can cure cancer or any other disease". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d7fe88def --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 2/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Diet-based == +Alkaline diet – a restrictive diet of non-acid foods, such as that proposed by Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), based on the claim this will affect the pH of the body generally, so reducing the risk of heart disease and cancer. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, "there is no evidence to support any of these claims." +Breuss diet – a diet based on vegetable juice and tea devised by Rudolf Breuss (1899–1990), who claimed it could cure cancer. Physicians have said that, in common with other "cancer diets", there is no evidence of effectiveness and some risk of harm. +Budwig protocol (or Budwig diet) – an "anti-cancer" diet developed in the 1950s by Johanna Budwig (1908–2003). The diet is rich in flaxseed oil mixed with cottage cheese, and emphasizes meals high in fruit, vegetables and fiber; it avoids sugar, animal fats, salad oil, meats, butter and especially margarine. Cancer Research UK say, "there is no reliable evidence to show that the Budwig diet [...] helps people with cancer". +Fasting and intermittent fasting – not eating or drinking for a period – a practice which has been claimed by some alternative medicine practitioners to help fight cancer, perhaps by "starving" tumors. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that fasting is effective for preventing or treating cancer in humans". Professional societies in France and the United Kingdom reached similar conclusions. +Hallelujah diet – a restrictive "biblical" diet based on raw food, claimed by its inventor to have cured his cancer. Stephen Barrett has written on Quackwatch: "Although low-fat, high-fiber diets can be healthful, the Hallelujah Diet is unbalanced and can lead to serious deficiencies." Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine agrees, adding the diet "makes no sense". +Ketogenic diet – a severe carbohydrate-restricted diet that induces ketosis and is used for the treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy. Advocates assume the diet avoids "fuelling" cancer tumors and say the diet can be used as a substitute for conventional treatment, but their claims are not supported by medical evidence. +Kousmine diet – a restrictive diet devised by Catherine Kousmine (1904–1992) which emphasized fruit, vegetables, grains, pulses and the use of vitamin supplements. There is no evidence that the diet is an effective cancer treatment. +Macrobiotic diet – a restrictive diet based on grains and unrefined foods, and promoted by some as a preventative and cure for cancer. Cancer Research UK states "we don't support the use of macrobiotic diets for people with cancer". +McDougall diet – a restrictive low-fat, starch based vegan diet devised by John A. McDougall. The diet is low in fat, high in fiber and contains no cholesterol. McDougall has promoted the diet as an alternative treatment for a number of chronic disorders, including cancer. However, there is no scientific evidence that McDougall's diet is effective. +Moerman Therapy – a highly restrictive diet devised by Cornelis Moerman (1893–1988). Its effectiveness is supported by anecdote only – there is no evidence of its worth as a cancer treatment. +Superfood – a marketing term applied to certain foods with supposed health-giving properties. Cancer Research UK note that superfoods are often promoted as having an ability to prevent or cure diseases, including cancer; they caution, "a healthy, balanced and varied diet can help to reduce the risk of cancer but it is unlikely that any single food will make a major difference on its own." + +== Electromagnetic and energy-based == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-10.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-10.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..38ccdee87 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-10.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 11/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Hyperbaric oxygen therapy – the use of a pressurized oxygen environment as therapy. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy has a number of accepted uses—for example hyperbaric chambers are used for treating decompression sickness. The therapy has also been promoted as a cure-all for a wide range of conditions, including cancer, for which there is no evidence of effectiveness. +Insulin potentiation therapy – the practice of injecting insulin, usually alongside a low dose of conventional chemotherapy drugs, in the belief that this improves the overall effect of the treatment. Although it may cause a temporary reduction in tumor size for some patients, there is no evidence that it improves survival time or any other main outcomes. +Krebiozen (also known as Carcalon, creatine, substance X, or drug X) – a mineral oil-based liquid sold as an alternative cancer treatment. According to the American Cancer Society: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Krebiozen is effective in treating cancer or any other disease. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), creatine has been linked to several dangerous side effects." +Lipoic acid – an antioxidant available as a dietary supplement and claimed by proponents to be capable of slowing cancer progression. According to the American Cancer Society, "there is no reliable scientific evidence at this time that lipoic acid prevents the development or spread of cancer". +Miracle Mineral Supplement (or MMS) – a toxic solution of 28% sodium chlorite in distilled water, is promoted for treating cancer and other ailments. Quackwatch states, "the product, when used as directed, produces an industrial bleach that can cause serious harm to health". +Orthomolecular medicine (or Megavitamin therapy) – the use of high doses of vitamins, claimed by proponents to help cure cancer. The view of the medical community is that there is no evidence that these therapies are effective for treating any disease. +Oxygen therapy – in alternative medicine, the practice of injecting hydrogen peroxide, oxygenating blood, or administering oxygen under pressure to the rectum, vagina, or other bodily opening. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that putting oxygen-releasing chemicals into a person's body is effective in treating cancer", and some of these treatments can be dangerous. +Ozone therapy – the application of ozone to the body, either externally or internally. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) prohibits all medical uses of ozone "in any medical condition for which there is no proof of safety and effectiveness", stating "ozone is a toxic gas with no known useful medical application in specific, adjunctive, or preventive therapy. Ozone therapy has been sold as an unproven treatment for various illnesses, including cancer, a practice which has been characterized as "pure quackery". The therapy can cause serious adverse effects, including death. +Pangamic acid – a name given to an ill-defined substance peddled by fraudster Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. (1911–1996) with the claim it could cure cancer and various other serious diseases. Sometimes called "vitamin B15", pangamic acid isn't a vitamin and is medically useless. +Phosphorylethanolamine – A chemical manufactured in Brazil by Gilberto Chierice and distributed with claims it could cure cancer. In 2015, after courts initially upheld people's rights to try phosphorylethanolamine, subsequent opposition from scientific and medical bodies led to a reversal in the law. Subsequent testing has found phosphorylethanolamine to be of no therapeutic benefit. +Poly-MVA – a dietary supplement created by Merrill Garnett (1931–), a former dentist turned biochemist. Poly-MVA is promoted as a treatment for a number of diseases including HIV/AIDS and cancer, but there is no medical evidence to support such claims and some concern that the use of Poly-MVA can interfere with the functioning of conventional cancer treatments. +Pregnenolone – a steroid which has been promoted online with claims it can treat a variety of diseases including multiple sclerosis, arthritis and cancer, but such claims are not backed by evidence. +Protandim – a herbal supplement fraudulently marketed with claims it can cure or prevent a number of serious health conditions, including cancer. +Quercetin – a plant pigment used in dietary supplements that have been promoted for their ability to prevent and treat cancer; however, according to the American Cancer society, "there is no reliable clinical evidence that quercetin can prevent or treat cancer in humans". +Revici's Guided Chemotherapy – a practice in which a chemical mixture (usually including lipid alcohol and various metals) is given by mouth or injection, supposedly to cure cancer. The practice was devised by Emanuel Revici (1896–1997) and differs from modern chemotherapy despite being named with the same term. According to the American Cancer Society: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Revici's guided chemotherapy is effective in treating cancer or any other disease. It may also cause potentially serious side effects." +RIGVIR – a virotherapy medication approved by the State Agency of Medicines of the Republic of Latvia. There is no good evidence that RIGVIR is an effective cancer treatment and a number of medical organisations have written to the Latvian government about the dubious science used to promote it. Its promotion has been described as likely being an instance of cancer quackery. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-11.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-11.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..788082026 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-11.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 12/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Shark cartilage – a dietary supplement made from ground shark skeleton, and promoted as a cancer treatment perhaps because of the mistaken notion that sharks do not get cancer. The Mayo Clinic conducted research and were "unable to demonstrate any suggestion of efficacy for this shark cartilage product in patients with advanced cancer". +Sodium bicarbonate (or baking soda) – the chemical compound with the formula NaHCO3, sometimes promoted as cure for cancer by alternative medical practitioners such as Tullio Simoncini. According to the American Cancer Society: "evidence also does not support the idea that sodium bicarbonate works as a treatment for any form of cancer. There is substantial evidence, however, that these claims are false." Edzard Ernst has called the promotion of sodium bicarbonate as a cancer cure "one of the more sickening alternative cancer scams I have seen for a long time". +Urine therapy – the practice of attempting to treat cancer—or other illnesses—by drinking, injecting or taking an enema of one's own urine, or by making and taking some derivative substance from it. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that urine or urea given in any form is helpful for cancer patients". +Vitacor – a type of vitamin supplement devised by Matthias Rath and heavily promoted on the internet, alongside other products from Rath's company under the "Cellular Health" brand, as a claimed treatment for cancer and other human disease; these claims have led to Rath's prosecution. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is no scientific evidence at all to back up the claims that these products work". + +== See also == +List of patent medicines +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4f2acb8bb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 3/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Bioresonance therapy – diagnosis and therapy delivered by attaching an electrical device to the patient, on the basis that cancer cells emit certain electromagnetic oscillations. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says that such claims are not supported by any evidence and note that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has prosecuted many sellers of such devices. +Electrohomeopathy (or Mattei cancer cure) – a treatment devised by Count Cesare Mattei (1809–1896), who proposed that different "colors" of electricity could be used to treat cancer. Popular in the late nineteenth century, electrohomeopathy has been described as "utter idiocy". +Electro Physiological Feedback Xrroid – an electronic device promoted as being capable of diagnosing and treating cancer and a host of other ailments. However, according to Quackwatch: "The Quantum Xrroid device is claimed to balance 'bio-energetic' forces that the scientific community does not recognize as real. It mainly reflects skin resistance (how easily low-voltage electric currents from the device pass through the skin), which is not related to the body's health." +Light therapy – the use of light to treat medical conditions. According to the American Cancer Society, alternative approaches—such as chromotherapy or the use of light boxes—have not been shown to be effective for cancer treatment. +Magnetic therapy – the practice of placing magnets on and around the body in order to treat illness. Although this has been promoted as a treatment for cancer and other diseases, the American Cancer Society says, "available scientific evidence does not support these claims". +Orgone – a type of life force proposed to exist by Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) which he claimed could be harnessed to cure diseases, including cancer, perhaps by sitting inside an "orgone accumulator"—a cupboard-like box with metal and organic linings. Quackwatch comments that scientists investigating Reich's ideas have been "unable to find the slightest evidence in Reich's data or elsewhere that such a thing as orgone exists". +Polarity therapy – a type of energy medicine based on the idea that the positive or negative charge of a person's electromagnetic field affects their health. Although it is promoted as effective for curing a number of human ailments, including cancer, the American Cancer Society says "available scientific evidence does not support claims that polarity therapy is effective in treating cancer or any other disease". +Rife Frequency Generator – an electronic device purported to cure cancer by transmitting radio waves. Cancer Research UK states, "there is no evidence to show that the Rife machine does what its supporters say it does". +Therapeutic Touch (or TT) – contrary to its name, a technique that does not usually involve touching; rather, a practitioner holds their hands close to a patient to affect the "energy" in their body. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support any claims that TT can cure cancer or other diseases". +Zoetron therapy – therapy based around a large electromagnetic device that emitted a weak field which, it was claimed, could kill cancer cells. Patients were charged US$15,000 up-front for treatment in Mexican clinics. In 2005 criminal charges were brought against the owners of the company making the device for their claims of its worth. Quackwatch says: "there is no scientific evidence or reason to believe that exposure to weak magnetic fields will kill any cells". + +== Hybrid == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a7ea1cb32 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 4/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Clark's "Cure for All Cancers" – an alternative medicine regime promoted by Hulda Regehr Clark (1928–2009), who (before her death from cancer) claimed it could cure all human diseases, including all cancers. The regime was based on the belief that disease was caused by "parasites", and included herbal remedies, chelation therapy and the use of electronic devices. Quackwatch describes her notions as "absurd". +Contreras therapy – treatment offered at the Oasis of Hope Hospital in Tijuana, Mexico which includes a number of ineffective treatments including the use of amygdalin and metabolic therapy. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center lists "Contreras Therapy" alongside others which "show no evidence of efficacy". +Gerson therapy – a predominantly diet regime, generally based on limiting salt, protein and other foods; ingesting large quantities of fruit and vegetables through juicing; augmenting the intake of potassium and iodine; and the use of coffee enemas. According to Cancer Research UK, "available scientific evidence does not support any claims that Gerson therapy can treat cancer [...] Gerson therapy can be very harmful to your health." +Gonzalez protocol – a treatment regime devised by Nicholas Gonzalez (1947–2015) based on Gerson therapy. The treatment is a type of metabolic therapy that has no evidence of efficacy. +Hoxsey therapy – a treatment consisting of a caustic herbal paste for external cancers or a herbal mixture for "internal" cancers, combined with laxatives, douches, vitamin supplements and dietary changes. A review by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found no evidence that the Hoxsey Therapy was effective as a treatment for cancer. +Issels treatment – a regime recommended to be used alongside conventional treatment. It requires removal of metal fillings from the patient's mouth, and adherence to a restrictive diet. Cancer Research UK state: "There is no scientific or medical evidence to back up the claims made by the Issels website". +Kelley treatment – a treatment regime devised by William Donald Kelley (1925–2005) based on Gerson therapy, with additional features including prayer and osteopathic manipulation. Famously, Steve McQueen used it for three months before his death. According to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Kelley treatment is a type of metabolic therapy that shows "no evidence of efficacy". +Live blood analysis – in alternative medicine, the practice of examining blood samples under a high-powered microscope, claiming this can detect and predict cancer and other illnesses, so leading to a prescription of dietary supplements that are supposed to function as treatment. The practice has been dismissed as quackery by the medical profession. +Livingston-Wheeler Therapy – a therapeutic regime that included a restricted diet, various drugs, therapy and the use of enemas. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that Livingston-Wheeler therapy was effective in treating cancer or any other disease". +Lorraine Day's 10-step program – a regime devised by Lorraine Day based on a restrictive diet and behavioral changes, such as giving up work and ceasing to watch television. Stephen Barrett wrote on Quackwatch, "In my opinion, her advice is untrustworthy and is particularly dangerous to people with cancer". +Metabolic therapies – an umbrella term for diet- and enema-based "detoxification" regimes, such as the Gerson therapy, promoted to cure cancer and other disease. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center states: "Retrospective reviews of the Gerson, Kelley and Contreras therapies show no evidence of efficacy." +Nieper therapy – a regimen devised by Hans Alfred Nieper (1928–1998) which was based on taking a variety of substances, including amygdalin and vitamins, and which Nieper claimed could treat a variety of serious ailments, including cancer. His methods were discredited as both ineffective and unsafe. + +== Plant- and fungus-based == +Actaea racemosa (or black cohosh) – a flowering plant from which dietary supplements are made that are promoted for their claimed health-giving properties. It is of no use preventing or treating cancer. Black cohosh may cause liver damage, and may be unsafe for use by those with hormone-sensitive cancers. +Aloe – a genus of flowering succulent plants native to Africa. According to Cancer Research UK, a potentially deadly product called T-UP is made of concentrated aloe, and promoted as a cancer cure. They say "there is currently no evidence that aloe products can help to prevent or treat cancer in humans". +Andrographis paniculata – a herb used in Ayurvedic medicine, and promoted as a dietary supplement for cancer prevention and cure. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has stated that there is no evidence that it helps prevent or cure cancer. +Aveloz (also called firestick plant, pencil tree or Euphorbia tirucalli) – a succulent shrub native to parts of Africa and South America. Its sap is promoted as a cancer treatment; however, according to the American Cancer Society, studies suggest that "aveloz sap may actually suppress the immune system, promote tumor growth, and lead to the development of certain types of cancer". +Bach flower remedies – preparations devised by Edward Bach (1886–1936) in which tiny amounts of plant material are diluted in a mixture of water and brandy. According to Cancer Research UK, flower remedies are sometimes promoted as being capable of boosting the immune system, but "there is no scientific evidence to prove that flower remedies can control, cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..da9334633 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 5/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Cannabidiol – a phytocannabinoid extracted from the cannabis plant. Many claims are made for the therapeutic benefit of cannabidiol that are not backed by sound evidence. Some claims—for example that cannabidiol be used to treat cancer—fall into the realm of pseudoscience. +Cannabis – Used as a recreational and medicinal drug. Chemicals derived from cannabis have been extensively researched for potential anti-cancer effect and while there has been much laboratory work, claims that cannabis has been proven to cure cancer are—according to Cancer Research UK—"highly misleading". The U.S. National Cancer Institute notes "Cannabis is not approved by the FDA for the treatment of any cancer-related symptom or side effect of cancer therapy." +Cansema (also called black salve) – a type of paste or poultice often promoted as a cancer cure, especially for skin cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, there is no evidence that this escharotic is effective in treating cancer, and it can be harmful, causing burns and disfigurement. + +Capsicum – the name given to a group of plants in the nightshade family, well known for producing hot chilli peppers such as the cayenne pepper and the jalapeño. A number of capsicum-based products, including teas and capsules, are promoted for their health benefits, including as a claimed cancer treatment. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific research does not support claims for the effectiveness of capsicum or whole pepper supplements in preventing or curing cancer at this time". +Carctol – a herbal dietary supplement made from ayurvedic herbs. It has been aggressively marketed in the United Kingdom as a cancer treatment, but there is no evidence of its effectiveness. +Cassava – a woody shrub native to South America, the root of which is a carbohydrate-rich foodstuff. Cassava root has been promoted as treatment for cancer. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "there is no convincing scientific evidence that cassava or tapioca is effective in preventing or treating cancer". +Castor oil – an oil made from the seeds of the castor oil plant. The claim has been made that applying it to the skin can help cure cancer. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that castor oil on the skin cures cancer or any other disease." +Chaparral (or Larrea tridentata) – a plant used to make a herbal remedy which is sold as cancer treatment. Cancer Research UK state that: "We don't recommend that you take chaparral to treat or prevent any type of cancer." +Chlorella – a type of algae promoted for its health-giving properties, including a claimed ability to treat cancer. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific studies do not support its effectiveness for preventing or treating cancer or any other disease in humans". +Echinacea – a group of herbaceous flowering plants in the daisy family, marketed as a herbal supplement that can help combat cancer. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is no scientific evidence to show that echinacea can help treat, prevent or cure cancer in any way." +Ellagic acid – a natural phenol found in some foods, especially berries, and which has been marketed as having the ability to prevent and treat a number of human maladies, including cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, such claims are not proven. +Essiac – a blended herbal tea devised in the early 20th century and promoted as a cancer cure. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration include Essiac in a list of "Fake Cancer 'Cures' Consumers Should Avoid". +Fermented wheat germ extract (FWGE) – a concentrated extract of wheat germ sold with the brand names Avemar and Awge. FWGE is marketed with a number of misleading medical claims, including that it supports the immune system and is useful in the treatment of cancer. + +Ginger – a root of plants of the Zingiber family, and a popular spice in many types of cuisine. Ginger has been promoted as a cancer treatment for its supposed ability to halt tumor growth; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support this". +Ginseng – a species of perennial plant, the root of which is promoted for its therapeutic value, including a claimed ability to help fight cancer. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that ginseng is effective in preventing or treating cancer in humans". +Glyconutrients – types of sugar extracted from plants; they are mostly marketed in a product with the brand name "Ambrotose" by Mannatech, Inc. According to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, these products have been "promoted aggressively to cancer patients" on the basis that they can help cellular health and boost the immune system, but "strong scientific evidence to support these claims is lacking". +Goldenseal (or Hydrastis canadensis) – an herb from the buttercup family promoted for treating many conditions, including cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, "evidence does not support claims that goldenseal is effective in treating cancer or other diseases. Goldenseal can have toxic side effects, and high doses can cause death." +Gotu kola – a swamp plant native to parts of Asia and Africa. Supplements made from it are promoted as cancer treatment; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims of its effectiveness for treating cancer or any other disease in humans". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dd0ec5049 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 6/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Grapes – fruit, popularized for supposed anti-cancer effect by Johanna Brandt (1876–1964) who championed a "grape diet", and promoted more recently in the form of grape seed extract (GSE). According to the American Cancer Society, "there is very little reliable scientific evidence available at this time that drinking red wine, eating grapes, or following the grape diet can prevent or treat cancer in people". +Inonotus obliquus – commonly known as chaga mushroom. Chaga has been used as a folk remedy in Russia and Siberia since the 16th century. According to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, "no clinical trials have been conducted to assess chaga's safety and efficacy for disease prevention or for the treatment of cancer, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes". They caution that the mushroom extract can interact with other drugs. +Juice Plus – a branded line of dietary supplements containing concentrated fruit and vegetable juice extract. In October 2009, Barrie R. Cassileth, chair and chief of integrative medicine at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, cautioned that while Juice Plus is being "aggressively promoted to cancer patients based on claims of antioxidant effects", the supplement should not be taken by patients because it can interfere with chemotherapy, nor should it be considered a substitute for fruit and vegetables. +Juicing (or juice therapy) – the practice of consuming juice made from raw fruit and vegetables. This has been claimed to bring many benefits such as slowing aging or curing cancer; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "there is no convincing scientific evidence that extracted juices are healthier than whole foods". + +Kombucha – a kind of fermented tea claimed to cure a variety of human illnesses including AIDS and cancer; however, these purported uses are not backed by evidence. The consumption of kombucha has been associated with adverse effects including muscle inflammation, poisoning and infection. At least one person has died after consuming kombucha, but the death could not be specifically linked to the drink. +Laetrile is a trade name for an amygdalin derivitive. It is a glycoside that has been promoted as a cancer cure. It has been found to be ineffective and toxic. Its promotion has been described as "the slickest, most sophisticated, and certainly the most remunerative cancer quack promotion in medical history." +Mangosteen – a fruit native to Southeast Asia which is promoted as a "superfruit" and in products such as XanGo juice for treating a variety of human ailments. According to the American Cancer Society, "there is no reliable evidence that mangosteen juice, puree, or bark is effective as a treatment for cancer in humans". +Milk thistle (Silybum marianum) – a biennial plant that grows in many locations over the world. Cancer Research UK say that milk thistle is promoted on the internet for its claimed ability to slow certain kinds of cancer, but that there is no good evidence in support of these claims. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0b2555e7f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 7/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mistletoe – a plant used in anthroposophical medicine, proposed as a cancer cure (in the form of mistletoe extract, called Iscador or Helixor) by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who believed it needed to be harvested when planetary alignment most influenced its potency. According to the American Cancer Society, "available evidence from well-designed clinical trials does not support claims that mistletoe can improve length or quality of life". +Modified citrus pectin – a substance chemically extracted from citrus fruits and marketed in dietary supplement form as a treatment for prostate cancer and melanoma. According to Cancer Research UK, it has "not been shown to have any activity in fighting cancer in people". +Moxibustion – the practice, used in conjunction with acupuncture or acupressure, of burning dried-up mugwort near the patient. The American Cancer Society comments, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that moxibustion is effective in preventing or treating cancer or any other disease". +Mushrooms – promoted on the internet as useful for cancer treatment. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is currently no evidence that any type of mushroom or mushroom extract can prevent or cure cancer". +Nerium oleander (or oleander) – one of the most poisonous of commonly grown garden plants, is the basis of an extract which is promoted to treat cancer and other ailments. According to the American Cancer Society, "even a small amount of oleander can cause death", and "the effectiveness of oleander has not been proven". +Noni juice – juice derived from the fruit of the Morinda citrifolia tree indigenous to Southeast Asia, Australasia, and the Caribbean. Noni juice has been promoted as a cure for cancer. However, The American Cancer Society say "there is no reliable clinical evidence that noni juice is effective in preventing or treating cancer or any other disease in humans". +Pau d'arco – a large South American rainforest tree whose bark (sometimes brewed into "lapacho" tea) is promoted as a treatment for many ailments, including cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, "available evidence from well-designed, controlled studies does not support this substance as an effective treatment for cancer in humans". +PC-SPES – a herbal supplement marketed (alongside similar supplements PC-CARE, PC-HOPE and PC-PLUS) as a treatment for prostate cancer. It has no medical benefit. +Pygeum – an extract made from Prunus africana, the African cherry. Following excitement at the end of the twentieth century about pygeum's therapeutic potential for treating benign prostatic hyperplasia, subsequent research has found it to have no benefit. +Rauvolfia serpentina (or snakeroot) – a plant used as the basis of a herbal remedy that some believe may treat cancer. According to the American Cancer Society: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Indian snakeroot is effective in treating cancer [...] It also has many dangerous side effects and is likely to increase the risk of cancer." +Red clover (Trifolium pratense) – a European species of clover, promoted as a treatment for a variety of health conditions, including cancers. According to the American Cancer Society, "available clinical evidence does not show that red clover is effective in treating or preventing cancer, menopausal symptoms, or any other medical conditions." +Saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) – a type of palm tree found growing in the southeastern United States. Its extract has been promoted as a prostate cancer medicine; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific studies do not support claims that saw palmetto can prevent or treat prostate cancer in humans". +Seasilver – an expensive dietary supplement made mostly from plant extracts and promoted by two U.S. companies. Extravagant claims for its curative powers led to the prosecution and fining of the companies' owners. According to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, "no studies have shown the efficacy of this costly product". + +Soursop (or graviola) – According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission soursop extract is among those products for which there is "no credible scientific evidence" of an ability to "prevent, cure, or treat cancer of any kind". +Strychnos nux-vomica – a tree native to Asia, the bark of which contains toxic strychnine. Strychnos is promoted within herbal medicine as being a treatment for a wide range of maladies including cancer and heart disease; there is, however, no evidence it is useful for treating any condition. +Ukrain – the trademarked name of a drug (sometimes called "celandine") made from Chelidonium majus, a plant in the poppy family. The drug is promoted for its health giving powers and its ability to treat cancer; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that celandine is effective in treating cancer in humans". +Uncaria tomentosa (or cat's claw) – a woody vine found in the tropical jungles of South and Central America, which is promoted as a remedy for cancer and other disease. The American Cancer Society state: "Available scientific evidence also does not support cat's claw's effectiveness in preventing or treating cancer or any other disease. Cat's claw is linked to some serious side effects, although the extent of those effects is not known". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0862b121e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 8/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Venus flytrap – a carnivorous plant, the extract of which has been promoted as a treatment for a variety of human ailments including skin cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that extract from the Venus flytrap plant is effective in treating skin cancer or any other type of cancer". +Walnuts – large, hard edible seeds of any tree of the genus Juglans. Black walnut has been promoted as a cancer cure on the basis it kills a "parasite" responsible for the disease. There exist walnut hull tinctures made with kerosene or other oil products; one such product which was intended to be used as a cancer treatment, named Todicamp and produced by Todicamp SRL, was recognized as harmful. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that hulls from black walnuts remove parasites from the intestinal tract or that they are effective in treating cancer or any other disease". +Wheatgrass – a food made from grains of wheat. According to the American Cancer Society, although some wheatgrass champions claim it can "shrink" cancer tumors, "available scientific evidence does not support the idea that wheatgrass or the wheatgrass diet can cure or prevent disease". +Wild yam (or Chinese yam) – types of yam, the roots of which are made into creams and dietary supplements that are promoted for a variety of medicinal purposes, including cancer prevention. The American Cancer Society says of these products, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that they are safe or effective." +Wilburn Ferguson's solution – a mixture of plants that were supposedly used by the Shuar people for the purpose of shrinking heads, that he claimed was also effective in treating cancerous tumors. No trials conducted according to modern scientific standards have ever shown that this solution is successful in curing cancer. + +== Physical procedures == + +Acupuncture – a mainstay of traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture attempts to regulate the flow of a supposed energy within the body by means of inserting needles through the skin at certain pre-designated points. Although there is some evidence that suggests acupuncture may help relieve some symptoms associated with cancer, such as treatment side effects, there is no evidence to support claims that acupuncture is an effective treatment for cancer. +Applied kinesiology – the practice of diagnosing and treating illness by touching and observing patients to detect meaningful signs in the muscles. Claims have been made that in a session, "spontaneous remission" of cancer can be observed. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support the claim that applied kinesiology can diagnose or treat cancer or other illness". +Chiropractic – the practice of manipulating the spine to treat many human ailments. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that chiropractic treatment cures cancer or any other life-threatening illness". +Craniosacral therapy (or CST) – a treatment devised by John Upledger in the 1970s. A CST practitioner will massage a patient's scalp in the belief that the precise positioning of their cranial bones can have a profound impact on their health. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that craniosacral therapy helps in treating cancer or any other disease". +Colon cleansing – the practice of cleansing the colon using laxatives and enemas to "detoxify" the body. Coffee enemas in particular are promoted as a cancer therapy. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that colon therapy is effective in treating cancer or any other disease". +Cupping – a procedure in which cups are used to create areas of suction on the body. Although claimed by proponents as an alternative cancer treatment, the American Cancer Society say "available scientific evidence does not support claims that cupping has any health benefits". +Dance therapy – the use of dance or physical movement to improve physical or mental well-being. The American Cancer Society states, "Few scientific studies have been done to evaluate the effects of dance therapy on health, prevention and recovery from illness. Clinical reports suggest dance therapy may be effective in improving self-esteem and reducing stress. As a form of exercise, dance therapy can be useful for both physical and emotional aspects of quality of life." A Cochrane review found too few studies to draw any conclusions about what effects dance therapy has on psychological or physical outcomes in cancer patients. +Ear candling – an alternative medical technique in which lighted candles are placed in the ears for supposed therapeutic effect. The practice has been promoted with extravagant claims it can "purify the blood" or "cure" cancer, but Health Canada has found it has no health benefit; it does, however, carry a serious risk of injury. +Psychic surgery – a sleight-of-hand confidence trick in which the practitioner pretends to remove a lump of tissue (typically raw animal entrails bought from a butcher) from a person. No evidence of objective benefit for any medical condition has been found. +Reiki – a procedure in which the practitioner might look at, blow on, tap and touch a patient in an attempt to affect the "energy" in their body. Although there is some evidence that reiki sessions are relaxing and so might improve general well-being, Cancer Research UK say that "there is no scientific evidence to prove that Reiki can prevent, treat or cure cancer or any other disease". +Shiatsu – a type of alternative medicine consisting of finger and palm pressure, stretches and other massage techniques. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is no scientific evidence to prove that shiatsu can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer." + +== Spiritual and mental healing == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-8.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ec2517947 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-8.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 9/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Cancer guided imagery – the practice of attempting to treat cancer in oneself by imagining it away. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that imagery can influence the development or progress of cancer". +Faith healing – the attempt to cure disease by spiritual means, often by prayer or participation in religious ritual. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments". +Hypnosis – the induction of a deeply relaxed and yet alert mental state. Some practitioners have claimed hypnosis might help boost the immune system. However, according to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not support the idea that hypnosis can influence the development or progression of cancer.". +Meditation (also Transcendental Meditation and Mindfulness) – mind-body practices in which patients attempt to master their own mental processes. According to the American Cancer Society while meditation "may help to improve the quality of life for people with cancer", "available scientific evidence does not suggest that meditation is effective in treating cancer or any other disease." +Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) – a series of behavioral techniques based on various supposed relationships between language and mental processes. NLP has been promoted as a treatment for HIV/AIDS and cancer, but such claims have no evidence to support them. +Anti-cancer psychotherapy – a technique claiming that a "cancer personality" caused cancer, which could be cured through talk therapy (e.g. that of the Simonton Cancer Center, Bernie Siegel's "Exceptional Cancer Patients" (ECaP) or Deepak Chopra). There is no reliable evidence that cancer cures sold or promoted by Deepak Chopra have any value. +Qigong – the practice of maintaining a meditative state while making gentle and fluid bodily movements, in an attempt to balance internal life energy. A systematic review of the effect of qigong exercises on cancer treatment concluded "the effectiveness of qigong in cancer care is not yet supported by the evidence from rigorous clinical trials." + +== Synthetic chemicals and other substances == + +714-X – sometimes called "tri­methyl­bi­cyclo­nitramine­o­heptane chloride", is a mixture of chemicals marketed commercially as a cure for many human ailments, including cancer. There is no scientific evidence for any anti-cancer effect from 714-X. +Antineoplaston therapy – a form of chemotherapy promoted by the Burzynski Clinic in Texas, United States. The American Cancer Society has found no evidence that antineoplastons have any beneficial effects in cancer, and it has recommended that people do not spend money on antineoplaston treatments. +Apitherapy – the use of products derived from bees, such as honey and bee venom, as a therapy. Apitherapy has been promoted for its anti-cancer effects; however, according to the American Cancer Society, "there have been no clinical studies in humans showing that bee venom or other honeybee products are effective in preventing or treating cancer." +Cancell (also called Protocel, Sheridan's Formula, Jim's Juice, Crocinic Acid, JS–114, JS–101, 126–F and Entelev) – a formula that has been promoted as a treatment for a wide range of diseases, including cancer. The American Cancer Society and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center recommend against the use of CanCell, as there is no evidence that it is effective in treating any disease, and its proposed method of action is not consistent with modern science. +Cell therapy – the practice of injecting cellular material from animals in an attempt to prevent or treat cancer. Although the use of human-to-human cell therapy has some established medical uses, the injection of animal material is, according to the American Cancer Society, not backed by any evidence of effectiveness, and "may in fact be lethal". +Caesium chloride – a toxic salt, promoted as a cancer cure (sometimes as "high pH therapy"), on the basis that it targets cancer cells. However, there is no evidence to support these claims, while serious adverse reactions have been reported. These include hypokalemia, arrhythmia and acute cardiac arrest. +Chelation therapy – removal of metals from the body by administering chelating agents. Chelation therapy is a legitimate therapy for heavy metal poisoning, but it has also been promoted as an alternative treatment for diseases including cancer. The American Cancer Society says: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that it is effective for treating other conditions such as cancer. Chelation therapy can be toxic and has the potential to cause kidney damage, irregular heartbeat and even death." +Cytokine therapy (or Klehr's autologous tumor therapy) – a so-called immunotherapy with a therapeutic substrate made of cytokines from the cancer patients' blood. The inventor of this method is Nikolaus Walther Klehr, a dermatologist, who practiced it in his private clinics in Salzburg and Munich. The patients were mainly from Slovenia, Poland and other Eastern European countries. Klehr is reported as claiming that his treatment leads to extended lifespan. According to German Cancer Aid, the mechanism of action is unclear and the method's clinical effectiveness unproven. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-9.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-9.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b6ae16a30 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments-9.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments" +chunk: 10/12 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproven_and_disproven_cancer_treatments" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:26:24.252849+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Colloidal silver – liquid containing a suspension of silver particles, marketed as a treatment for cancer and other ailments. Quackwatch states that colloidal silver dietary supplements have not been found safe or effective for the treatment of any condition. Ingestion of ionic silver can cause a rare condition called argyria in which silver is reduced to elemental form inside tissues, causing an irreversible blue/gray complexion. +Coral calcium – a dietary supplement supposedly made from crushed coral and promoted with claims it could treat a number of diseases including cancer. A consumer advisory issued by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine stated "Consumers should be aware that claims that coral calcium can treat or cure cancer, multiple sclerosis, lupus, heart disease, or high blood pressure are not supported by existing scientific evidence". +DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone) – a steroid hormone that has been promoted in supplement form for its claimed cancer prevention properties; there is no scientific evidence to support these claims. +Di Bella Therapy – a cocktail of vitamins, drugs and hormones devised by Luigi di Bella (1912–2003) and promoted as a cancer treatment. According to the American Cancer Society: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Di Bella therapy is effective in treating cancer. It can cause serious and harmful side effects. ... [These] may include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, increased blood sugar levels, low blood pressure, sleepiness and neurological symptoms." +Dimethyl sulfoxide (or DMSO) – an organosulfur compound that has been promoted as a treatment for cancer since the 1960s. According to the American Cancer Society, "available scientific evidence does not suggest that DMSO is effective in treating cancer in humans". +Emu oil – an oil derived from adipose tissue of the emu, and promoted in dietary supplement form with the claimed ability to treat a wide range of diseases, including cancer. These products have been cited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a prime example of a "rip-off". +Fenbendazole – an antiparasitic drug, has been falsely promoted on social media as a "miracle cure" for cancers, often with the use of florid testimonials. +Gc-MAF (Gc protein-derived macrophage activating factor) – a type of protein that affects the immune system, and which has been promoted as a "miracle cure" for cancer and HIV. According to Cancer Research UK, "there is no solid scientific evidence to show that the treatment is safe or effective". +Germanium – a metalloid which has been sold in supplement form with the claim that it is capable of treating leukemia and lung cancer. There is, however, no evidence of benefit, and instead some evidence that such supplements are actively harmful. +Hydrazine sulfate – a chemical compound promoted (sometimes as "rocket fuel treatment") for its supposed ability to treat cancer. According to Cancer Research UK, although there is some evidence Hydrazine sulfate might help some people with cancer gain weight, "there is no evidence that it helps to treat cancer". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..be1be63cb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt_Grunewald" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:42.339486+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald or LVA ('Grunewald Locomotive Research Office') was a facility established from 1920 to 1945 at Berlin-Grunewald in Germany that conducted trials on railway vehicles. The office used the facilities of the railway repair shop (Ausbesserungswerk) at Grunewald on the Berlin Stadtbahn southwest of Berlin's Westkreuz station. + + +== History == +After the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft was founded in 1925 the Railway Central Office (Eisenbahn-Zentralamt or EZA) that had existed since 1906 was renamed to the Reichsbahn Central Office (Reichsbahnzentralamt or RZA). Amongst other things, they carried out numerous trials on steam locomotives and created the scientific basis for the performance measurement of railway vehicles. From 1920 they were supported by the Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald, a locomotive trials office based at the main railway workshop at Grunewald. In 1936 there were 152 employees working for this research establishment. +In 1945 the work at Grunewald ended, due to the war, and was continued in East Germany at RAW Dessau as well as in Halle, and in West Germany initially at Göttingen, and later in Minden and München. +The Office had instrumentation vehicles, a rolling test bed with water brakes for locomotives and test rigs for various vehicle components. + + +== Key personalities == +The following employees are particularly closely associated with the establishment: + +Robert Garbe (1847–1932) +Hans Nordmann (1879–1957) +Richard Paul Wagner (1882–1953) + + +== Grunewald Research Office today == +At the site today are a few Deutsche Bahn office buildings, several small firms and a golf course. + + +== Gallery == + + +== Footnotes and references == + + +== Sources == +Dirk Winkler: Lokomotiv-Versuchsamt Grunewald, GeraMond, ISBN 3-7654-7131-3 + + +== See also == +History of rail transport in Germany +Deutsche Reichsbahn \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..189d5eb0b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Many-minds interpretation" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:18.682284+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics extends the many-worlds interpretation by proposing that the distinction between worlds should be made at the level of the mind of an individual observer. The concept was first introduced in 1970 by H. Dieter Zeh as a variant of the Hugh Everett interpretation in connection with quantum decoherence, and later (in 1981) explicitly called a many or multi-consciousness interpretation. The name many-minds interpretation was first used by David Albert and Barry Loewer in 1988. + +== History == + +=== Interpretations of quantum mechanics === + +The various interpretations of quantum mechanics typically involve explaining the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, or to create a physical picture of the theory. While the mathematical structure has a strong foundation, there is still much debate about the physical and philosophical interpretation of the theory. These interpretations aim to tackle various concepts such as: + +Evolution of the state of a quantum system (given by the wavefunction), typically through the use of the Schrödinger equation. This concept is almost universally accepted, and is rarely put to debate. +The measurement problem, which relates to what is called wavefunction collapse – the collapse of a quantum state into a definite measurement (i.e. a specific eigenstate of the wavefunction). The debate on whether this collapse actually occurs is a central problem in interpreting quantum mechanics. +The standard solution to the measurement problem is the "Orthodox" or "Copenhagen" interpretation, which claims that the wave function collapses as the result of a measurement by an observer or apparatus external to the quantum system. An alternative interpretation, the Many-worlds Interpretation, was first described by Hugh Everett in 1957 (where it was called the relative state interpretation, the name Many-worlds was coined by Bryce Seligman DeWitt starting in the 1960s and finalized in the 1970s). His formalism of quantum mechanics denied that a measurement requires a wave collapse, instead suggesting that all that is truly necessary of a measurement is that a quantum connection is formed between the particle, the measuring device, and the observer. + +=== The many-worlds interpretation === + +In the original relative state formulation, Everett proposed that there is one universal wavefunction that describes the objective reality of the whole universe. He stated that when subsystems interact, the total system becomes a superposition of these subsystems. This includes observers and measurement systems, which become part of one universal state (the wavefunction) that is always described via the Schrödinger Equation (or its relativistic alternative). That is, the states of the subsystems that interacted become "entangled" in such a way that any definition of one must necessarily involve the other. Thus, each subsystem's state can only be described relative to each subsystem with which it interacts (hence the name relative state). +Everett suggested that the universe is actually indeterminate as a whole. For example, consider an observer measuring some particle that starts in an undetermined state, as both spin-up and spin-down, that is – a superposition of both possibilities. When an observer measures that particle's spin, however, it always registers as either up or down. The problem of how to understand this sudden shift from "both up and down" to "either up or down" is called the Measurement problem. According to the many-worlds interpretation, the act of measurement forced a “splitting” of the universe into two states, one spin-up and the other spin-down, and the two branches that extend from those two subsequently independent states. One branch measures up. The other measures down. Looking at the instrument informs the observer which branch he is on, but the system itself is indeterminate at this and, by logical extension, presumably any higher level. +The “worlds” in the many worlds theory is then just the complete measurement history up until and during the measurement in question, where splitting happens. These “worlds” each describe a different state of the universal wave function and cannot communicate. There is no collapse of the wavefunction into one state or another, but rather an observer finds itself in the world leading up to what measurement it has made and is unaware of the other possibilities that are equally real. + +=== The many-minds interpretation === +The many-minds interpretation of quantum theory is many-worlds with the distinction between worlds constructed at the level of the individual observer. Rather than the worlds that branch, it is the observer's mind that branches. +The problem with this interpretation is that it implies the observer must be in a superposition with herself, and that seems strange. In their 1988 paper, Albert and Loewer argued that the mind of an observer cannot be in an indefinite state because an observer must answer the question about which state of a system he has observed with complete certainty. If the observer's mind were in a superposition of states, then it could not attain such certainty. To overcome this contradiction, they suggest that a mind must always be in a definite state and only the “bodies” of the minds are in a superposition. +Accordingly, when an observer measures a quantum system and becomes entangled with it, the result is a larger quantum system. In regards to each possibility within this greater wave function, a mental state of the brain corresponds. Ultimately, only one of these mental states is experienced, leading the others to branch off and become inaccessible, albeit real. In this way, every sentient being possesses an infinity of minds, whose prevalence correspond to the amplitude of the wavefunction. As an observer checks a measurement, the probability of realizing a specific measurement directly correlates to the number of minds they have where they see that measurement. It is in this way that the probabilistic nature of quantum measurements are obtained by the Many-minds Interpretation. + +== Quantum non-locality in the many-minds interpretation == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bda8b8010 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Many-minds interpretation" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:18.682284+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Consider an experiment that measures the polarization of two photons. When the photon is created, it has an indeterminate polarization. If a stream of these photons is passed through a polarization filter, 50% of the light is passed through. This corresponds to each photon having a 50% chance of aligning with the filter and thus passing, or being misaligned (by 90 degrees relative to the polarization filter) and being absorbed. Quantum mechanically, this means the photon is in a superposition of states where it is either passed or absorbed. Now, consider the inclusion of another photon and polarization detector. Now, the photons are created in such a way that they are entangled. That is, when one photon takes on a polarization state, the other photon will always behave as if it has the same polarization. For simplicity, take the second filter to either be perfectly aligned with the first, or to be perfectly misaligned (90 degree difference in angle, such that it is absorbed). If the detectors are aligned, both photons are passed (i.e. they are said to agree). If they are misaligned, only the first passes and the second is absorbed (now they disagree). Thus, the entanglement causes perfect correlations between the two measurements – regardless of separation distance, making the interaction non-local. This sort of experiment is further explained in Tim Maudlin's Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity, and can be related to Bell test experiments. Now, consider the analysis of this experiment from the many minds point of view: + +=== No sentient observer === +Consider the case where there is no sentient observer, i.e. no mind present to observe the experiment. In this case, the detector will be in an indefinite state. The photon is both passed and absorbed, and will remain in this state. The correlations are withheld in that none of the possible "minds", or wave function states, correspond to non correlated results. + +=== One sentient observer === +Now expand the situation to have one sentient being observing the device. Now, they too enter the indefinite state. Their eyes, body, and brain are seeing both spins at the same time. The mind however, stochastically chooses one of the directions, and that is what the mind sees. When this observer views the second detector, their body will see both results. Their mind will choose the result that agrees with the first detector, and the observer will see the expected results. However, the observer's mind seeing one result does not directly affect the distant state – there is just no wave function in which the expected correlations do not exist. The true correlation only happens when they actually view the second detector. + +=== Two sentient observers === +When two people look at two different detectors that scan entangled particles, both observers will enter an indefinite state, as with one observer. These results need not agree – the second observer's mind does not have to have results that correlate with the first's. When one observer tells the results to the second observer, their two minds cannot communicate and thus will only interact with the other's body, which is still indefinite. When the second observer responds, his body will respond with whatever result agrees with the first observer's mind. This means that both observer's minds will be in a state of the wavefunction that always get the expected results, but individually their results could be different. + +=== Non-locality of the many-minds interpretation === +As we have thus seen, any correlations seen in the wavefunction of each observer's minds are only concrete after interaction between the different polarizers. The correlations on the level of individual minds correspond to the appearance of quantum non-locality (or equivalently, violation of Bell's inequality). So the many world is non-local, or it cannot explain EPR-GHZ correlations. + +== Support == +There is currently no empirical evidence for the many-minds interpretation. However, there are theories that do not discredit the many-minds interpretation. In light of Bell's analysis of the consequences of quantum non-locality, empirical evidence is needed to avoid inventing novel fundamental concepts (hidden variables). Two different solutions of the measurement problem then appear conceivable: consciousness causes collapse or Everett's relative state interpretation. In both cases a (suitably modified) psycho-physical parallelism can be re-established. +If neural processes can be described and analyzed then some experiments could potentially be created to test whether affecting neural processes can have an effect on a quantum system. Speculation about the details of this awareness-local physical system coupling on a purely theoretical basis could occur, however experimentally searching for them through neurological and psychological studies would be ideal. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..96f4959df --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Many-minds interpretation" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-minds_interpretation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:18.682284+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Objections == +Nothing within quantum theory itself requires each possibility within a wave function to complement a mental state. As all physical states (i.e. brain states) are quantum states, their associated mental states should be also. Nonetheless, it is not what one experiences within physical reality. Albert and Loewer argue that the mind must be intrinsically different than the physical reality as described by quantum theory. Thereby, they reject type-identity physicalism in favour of a non-reductive stance. However, Lockwood saves materialism through the notion of supervenience of the mental on the physical. +Nonetheless, the many-minds interpretation does not solve the mindless hulks problem as a problem of supervenience. Mental states do not supervene on brain states as a given brain state is compatible with different configurations of mental states. +Another serious objection is that workers in no collapse interpretations have produced no more than elementary models based on the definite existence of specific measuring devices. They have assumed, for example, that the Hilbert space of the universe splits naturally into a tensor product structure compatible with the measurement under consideration. They have also assumed, even when describing the behaviour of macroscopic objects, that it is appropriate to employ models in which only a few dimensions of Hilbert space are used to describe all the relevant behaviour. +Furthermore, as the many-minds interpretation is corroborated by our experience of physical reality, a notion of many unseen worlds and its compatibility with other physical theories (i.e. the principle of the conservation of mass) is difficult to reconcile. According to Schrödinger's equation, the mass-energy of the combined observed system and measurement apparatus is the same before and after. However, with every measurement process (i.e. splitting), the total mass-energy would seemingly increase. +Peter J. Lewis argues that the many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics has absurd implications for agents facing life-or-death decisions. +In general, the many-minds theory holds that a conscious being who observes the outcome of a random zero-sum experiment will evolve into two successors in different observer states, each of whom observes one of the possible outcomes. Moreover, the theory advises one to favour choices in such situations in proportion to the probability that they will bring good results to one's various successors. But in a life-or-death case like an observer getting into the box with Schrödinger's cat, the observer will only have one successor, since one of the outcomes will ensure the observers death. So it seems that the many-minds interpretation advises one to get in the box with the cat, since it is certain that one's only successor will emerge unharmed. See also quantum suicide and immortality. +Finally, it supposes that there is some physical distinction between a conscious observer and a non-conscious measuring device, so it seems to require eliminating the strong Church–Turing hypothesis or postulating a physical model for consciousness. + +== See also == +Consciousness +Quantum suicide and immortality +Quantum mind +Many-worlds interpretation +Wave function + +== References == + +== External links == +Wikibook on consciousness +Bibliography on the Many-minds interpretation \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..30f492b7f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_W._Rossiter_History_of_Women_in_Science_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:14.378453+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize is awarded by the History of Science Society for an outstanding book (in odd-numbered years) or article (in even-numbered years) on the history of women in science, published at most four years before the year of the award. It was previously called the Women's Prize, but in 2004 the History of Science Society Council voted unanimously at its annual meeting to rename it the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize. + + +== Recipients == + + +== See also == + +List of general science and technology awards +List of history awards +List of science and technology awards for women +Women in chemistry +Women in science + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..32d87e3e3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Max Tegmark" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:29.273945+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher and author. He is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded and leads the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on reducing global catastrophic risks from advanced technologies. +Originally a cosmologist, Tegmark's focus shifted toward artificial intelligence (AI). His 2017 book Life 3.0 presents scenarios for what the world might look like as AI continues to develop. Tegmark advocates for a halt on the development of artificial superintelligence. + +== Early life == +Max Erik Tegmark was born Max Erik Shapiro in Stockholm, Sweden, on 5 May 1967, to Karin Tegmark and mathematician Harold S. Shapiro. +Tegmark grew up in Bromma, Stockholm. During his studies at Blackeberg's high school, he worked as a volunteer for the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, campaigning for nuclear disarmament. +While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, he adopted his mother's surname Tegmark, as there were many astronomers named Shapiro, including one of his professors. While in high school, Tegmark and a friend, Magnus Bodin, created and sold a word processor, Teddy, written in machine code for the Swedish eight-bit computer ABC 80 as a summer project, which was marketed "in a very modest manner" by Liber Läromedel, and—per Tegman's autobiographical description—he also coded a 3D Tetris-like game called Frac. +Tegmark left Sweden after receiving his B.A. in economics in 1989 at the Stockholm School of Economics, and an M.S.E in engineering physics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 1990. He next studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994 under the supervision of Joseph Silk. + +== Career == +Tegmark started as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving tenure in 2003. In 2004, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's department of physics. +Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the president of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded with Anthony Aguirre, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. + +== Research == + +=== Cosmology === +Tegmark has worked on precision cosmology, which combines "theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters". He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to cosmic microwave background experiments such as COBE, QMAP, and WMAP, and to galaxy redshift surveys such as the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, the 2dF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. +Alongside Daniel Eisenstein and Wayne Hu, he introduced in 1998 in The Astrophysical Journal the idea of using baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler. His 2000 paper in Physical Review E, on quantum decoherence of neurons, concluded that decoherence is too rapid for Roger Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction ("quantum microtubule") model of consciousness to be viable. Working with Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Andrew Hamilton, Tegmark reported in 2003 the discovery of the anomalous multipole alignment in the WMAP data, sometimes referred to as the "axis of evil". Tegmark also proposed in 2007 the mathematical universe hypothesis, which postulates that the physical universe is a mathematical structure. Mathematician Edward Frenkel characterized the mathematical universe hypothesis as "science fiction and mysticism" rather than science. + +=== Journalism === +Tegmark led a research project at MIT, beginning in 2020, focused on the application of machine learning to the classification of news reports. They called the AI-driven news aggregator "Improving the News". To maintain and scale the work, Tegmark and his wife and colleague Meia Chita-Tegmark founded the eponymous Improve the News Foundation (ITN) as an "apolitical" 501(c)(3) nonprofit in October 2020, with the stated mission to help "readers rise above controversies and understand the world in a nuanced way." The ITN product was rebranded as "Verity News" in 2023. + +=== Machine learning === +In the 2010s, after having focused on cosmology and quantum information for around 25 years, Tegmark's research started to focus on machine learning and AI safety. He has worked at the MIT on how to use AI in physics and how to improve AI using insights from physics. In 2024, he co-authored a paper introducing Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), which differ fundamentally from the neural networks typically used in machine learning and are designed to be more interpretable. KANs are based on the Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem, which was previously thought to be irrelevant to machine learning. + +== Future of Life Institute == +Under Tegmark's founding leadership, the Future of Life Institute has pursued a stated mission to "steer transformative technologies away from extreme, large-scale risks and towards benefiting life." It is focused on research aiming to mitigate existential risks for humanity, particularly those related to advanced AI. A co-founding faculty member was University of California, Santa Cruz professor Anthony Aguirre, and its board-level leadership has included Elon Musk, Skype- and Kazaa-founder Jaan Tallinn, as well as celebrities (Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman), and individual graduate students (including his wife, Meia Chita-Tegmark, then a Boston University PhD-student). Tegmark and the organization are academic proponents of approaches and views that are aware and wrestle with the potential risks associated with the development of AI. It received a cryptocurrency donation of $665 million donation from Vitalik Buterin in 2021, as well as a $10 million donation from Elon Musk in 2015 and additional funding by Jaan Tallinn. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fc3febf26 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,90 @@ +--- +title: "Max Tegmark" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:29.273945+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Controversy === +In 2023, Tegmark was the focus of a controversy when he was alleged to have signed a letter of intent on behalf of the Future of Life Institute for a $100,000 grant—ultimately rejected—to far-right media outlet Nya Dagbladet, an outlet for which Tegmark's brother wrote, an allegation to which the Institute formally responded. Tegmark later said that the Institute "ultimately decided to reject it because of what our subsequent due diligence uncovered", that they rejected it long before the media became involved, and that the institute "finds Nazi, neo-Nazi or pro-Nazi groups or ideologies despicable and would never knowingly support them". An official statement from the Future of Life Institute further expands on this: "FLI finds groups or ideologies espousing antisemitism, white supremacy, or racism despicable and would never knowingly support any such group". + +== Awards and recognition == +Tegmark was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to cosmology, including precision measurements from cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering data, tests of inflation and gravitation theories, and the development of a new technology for low-frequency radio interferometry". +He was awarded the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science's Gold Medal in 2019 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to our understanding of humanity's place in the cosmos and the opportunities and risks associated with artificial intelligence. He has courageously tackled these existential questions in his research and, in a commendable way, succeeded in communicating the issues to a wider public." +In 2023, Time named Tegmark one of the 100 most influential people in AI. + +== Publications == + +=== Books === +Tegmark, Max (2014). Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Knopf. +Tegmark, Max (2017). Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Knopf. + +=== Selected articles === +Eisenstein, Daniel J.; Hu, Wayne; Tegmark, Max (1998). "Cosmic Complementarity: + + + + + H + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle H_{0}} + + and + + + + + Ω + + m + + + + + {\displaystyle \Omega _{m}} + + from Combining Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments and Redshift Surveys". The Astrophysical Journal. 504 (2): L57–L60. arXiv:astro-ph/9805239. Bibcode:1998ApJ...504L..57E. doi:10.1086/311582. S2CID 8824919. +Tegmark, Max (1 April 2000). "The Importance of Quantum Decoherence in Brain Processes". Physical Review E. 61 (4): 4194–4206. arXiv:quant-ph/9907009. Bibcode:2000PhRvE..61.4194T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.61.4194. PMID 11088215. S2CID 17140058. +Tegmark, Max; de Oliveira-Costa, Angélica; Hamilton, Andrew (1 December 2003). "High Resolution Foreground Cleaned CMB Map from WMAP". Physical Review D. 68 (12) 123523. arXiv:astro-ph/0302496. Bibcode:2003PhRvD..68l3523T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.68.123523. S2CID 17981329. +Tegmark, Max; et al. (2004). "Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP". Physical Review D. 69 (10) 103501. arXiv:astro-ph/0310723. Bibcode:2004PhRvD..69j3501T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.69.103501. +Tegmark, Max; et al. (2004). "The three-dimensional power spectrum of galaxies from the sloan digital sky survey". The Astrophysical Journal. 606 (2): 702–740. arXiv:astro-ph/0310725. Bibcode:2004ApJ...606..702T. doi:10.1086/382125. +Tegmark, Max (2008). "The Mathematical Universe". Foundations of Physics. 38 (2): 101–150. arXiv:0704.0646. Bibcode:2008FoPh...38..101T. doi:10.1007/s10701-007-9186-9. S2CID 9890455. +Aguirre, Anthony; Tegmark, Max (3 November 2011). "Born in an Infinite Universe: A Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics". Physical Review D. 84 (10) 105002. arXiv:1008.1066. Bibcode:2011PhRvD..84j5002A. doi:10.1103/physrevd.84.105002. ISSN 1550-7998. S2CID 17341893. + +== Media activities == +In 2006, Tegmark was one of fifty scientists interviewed by New Scientist about their predictions for the future. His prediction: "In 50 years, you may be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universes." +Tegmark appears in the 2007 documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives in which he is interviewed by Mark Oliver Everett, son of the founder of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, Hugh Everett. +Tegmark also appears in "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole?", "What Time is It?", "To Infinity and Beyond", "Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?", "What is Reality?" and "Which Universe Are We In?", all part of the BBC's Horizon scientific series of programmes. +He appears in several episodes of Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, an American documentary television series on science which first aired in the United States on December 1, 2009. The series is hosted by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. +Tegmark was interviewed by Morgan Freeman in seasons 2 and 3 of Through the Wormhole in 2011–2012. +Tegmark participated in the episode "Zooming Out" of BBC World Service's The Forum, which first aired on BBC Radio 4 on 26 April 2014. +In 2014, Tegmark co-authored an op-ed in The Huffington Post with Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek and Stuart Russell on the movie Transcendence. +In 2014, "The Perpetual Earth Program," a play based on Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe, was mounted in New York City as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festival. +In 2014, he featured in The Principle, a documentary examining the Copernican Principle. +In 2015, Tegmark participated in an episode of Sam Harris' the Waking Up podcast entitled "The Multiverse & You (& You & You & You...)" where they discussed topics such as artificial intelligence and the mathematical universe hypothesis. +In 2017, Tegmark gave a talk entitled "Effective altruism, existential risk & existential hope" at the world's largest annual conference of the effective altruism movement. +In 2017, Tegmark participated in an episode of Sam Harris' the Waking Up podcast entitled "The Future of Intelligence" where they discussed topics such as artificial intelligence and definitions of life. +In 2018, Tegmark took part in a conversation with podcaster Lex Fridman about Artificial General Intelligence as part of a MIT course on AGI. He was the first guest on the Lex Fridman podcast. He was interviewed again on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2021 and in 2023. +Tegmark is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence, Do You Trust This Computer?. + +== Personal life == +Tegmark married astrophysicist Angelica de Oliveira-Costa in 1997, and divorced in 2009. They have two sons. On August 5, 2012, Tegmark married Meia Chita. +Tegmark's brother is the journalist Per Shapiro, who has written for the far-right, populist Swedish newspaper Nya Dagbladet. + +== See also == +List of astronomers +List of physicists + +== References == + +== External links == + +Official website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c59ad5675 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: "Mechanism (philosophy)" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:50.247370+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are similar to complicated machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. +The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two different varieties. They are both doctrines of metaphysics, but they are different in scope and ambitions: the first is a global doctrine about nature; the second is a local doctrine about humans and their minds, which is hotly contested. For clarity, we might distinguish these two doctrines as universal mechanism and anthropic mechanism. + +== Mechanical philosophy == + +Mechanical philosophy is a form of natural philosophy which compares the universe to a large-scale mechanism (i.e. a machine). Mechanical philosophy is associated with the Scientific Revolution of early modern Europe. One of the first expositions of universal mechanism is found in the opening passages of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, published in 1651. +Some intellectual historians and critical theorists argue that early mechanical philosophy was tied to disenchantment and the rejection of the idea of nature as living or animated by spirits or angels. Other scholars, however, have noted that early mechanical philosophers nevertheless believed in magic, Christianity and spiritualism. + +=== Mechanism and determinism === +Some ancient philosophies held that the universe is reducible to completely mechanical principles—that is, the motion and collision of matter. This view was closely linked with materialism and reductionism, especially that of the atomists and to a large extent, stoic physics. Later mechanists believed the achievements of the scientific revolution of the 17th century had shown that all phenomena could eventually be explained in terms of "mechanical laws": natural laws governing the motion and collision of matter that imply a determinism. If all phenomena can be explained entirely through the motion of matter under physical laws, as the gears of a clock determine that it must strike 2:00 an hour after striking 1:00, all phenomena must be completely determined, past, present or future. + +=== Development === + +The natural philosophers concerned with developing the mechanical philosophy were largely a French group, together with some of their personal connections. They included Pierre Gassendi, Marin Mersenne and René Descartes. Also involved were the English thinkers Sir Kenelm Digby, Thomas Hobbes and Walter Charleton; and the Dutch natural philosopher Isaac Beeckman. +Robert Boyle used "mechanical philosophers" to refer both to those with a theory of "corpuscles" or atoms of matter, such as Gassendi and Descartes, and those who did without such a theory. One common factor was the clockwork universe view. His meaning would be problematic in the cases of Hobbes and Galileo Galilei; it would include Nicolas Lemery and Christiaan Huygens, as well as himself. Newton would be a transitional figure. Contemporary usage of "mechanical philosophy" dates back to 1952 and Marie Boas Hall. +In France the mechanical philosophy spread mostly through private academies and salons; in England in the Royal Society. In England it did not have a large initial impact in universities, which were somewhat more receptive in France, the Netherlands and Germany. + +==== Hobbes ==== +One of the first expositions of universal mechanism is found in the opening passages of Leviathan (1651) by Hobbes; the book's second chapter invokes the principle of inertia, foundational for the mechanical philosophy. Boyle did not mention him as one of the group; but at the time they were on opposite sides of a controversy. Richard Westfall deems him a mechanical philosopher. +Hobbes's major statement of his natural philosophy is in De Corpore (1655). In part II and III of this work he goes a long way towards identifying fundamental physics with geometry; and he freely mixes concepts from the two areas. + +==== Descartes ==== + +Descartes was also a mechanist. A substance dualist, he argued that reality is composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. He identified matter with the spatial extension which is its only clear and distinct idea, and consequently denied the existence of vacuum. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other. Nevertheless, his understanding of biology was mechanistic in nature: + +"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels." (Descartes, Treatise on Man, p. 108.) +His scientific work was based on the traditional mechanistic understanding which maintains that animals and humans are completely mechanistic automata. Descartes' dualism was motivated by the seeming impossibility that mechanical dynamics could yield mental experiences. + +==== Beeckman ==== +Isaac Beeckman's theory of mechanical philosophy described in his books Centuria and Journal is grounded in two components: matter and motion. To explain matter, Beeckman relied on a philosophy of atomism which explains that matter is composed of tiny inseparable particles that interact to create the objects seen in life. To explain motion, he supported the idea of inertia, a theory generated by Isaac Newton. + +==== Newton ==== +Isaac Newton ushered in a weaker notion of mechanism that tolerated the action at a distance of gravity. Interpretations of Newton's scientific work in light of his occult research have suggested that he did not properly view the universe as mechanistic, but instead populated by mysterious forces and spirits and constantly sustained by God and angels. Later generations of philosophers who were influenced by Newton's example were nonetheless often mechanists. Among them were Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Denis Diderot. + +==== Pierre de Laplace ==== +The French mechanist and determinist Pierre Simon de Laplace formulated some implications of the mechanist thesis, writing: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..05e43d94d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Mechanism (philosophy)" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:50.247370+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. + +=== Criticism === + +Critics argue that although mechanical philosophy includes a wide range of useful observational and principled data, it has not adequately explained the world and its components, and there are weaknesses in its definitions. Among the criticisms made of this philosophy are: + +Experts in religious studies have criticized the philosophy that God's intervention in the management of the world seems unnecessary. +Newton's mechanical philosophy, with all its positive effects on human life, ultimately leads to Deism. +It is a stagnant worldview that cannot explain God's constant presence and favor in the world. +At the height of this philosophy, God was viewed as a skilled designer, and for him the mental structure and human morality were conceived. +The assumption that God tuned the world like a clock and left it to its own devices is in clear conflict with the God of the Bible, who is at all times directly and immediately involved in his creation. +This philosophy abandons concepts such as essence, accident, matter, form, act and potential that are used in ontology, and denies the involvement of transcendental affairs in the management of this world. +This philosophy is generally incapable of explaining human spiritual experiences and the immaterial realms of the world. +The mechanistic philosophy arbitrarily bifurcates the natural world into groupings of causes and effects, which follow the dictates of forces and active principles which are ascribed as objective universalities within the natural world anthropomorphically. + +== Universal mechanism == +The older doctrine, here called universal mechanism, is the ancient philosophies closely linked with materialism and reductionism, especially that of the atomists and to a large extent, stoic physics. They held that the universe is reducible to completely mechanical principles—that is, the motion and collision of matter. Later mechanists believed the achievements of the Scientific Revolution had shown that all phenomena could eventually be explained in terms of 'mechanical' laws, natural laws governing the motion and collision of matter that implied a thorough going determinism: if all phenomena could be explained entirely through the motion of matter under the laws of classical physics, then even more surely than the gears of a clock determine that it must strike 2:00 an hour after striking 1:00, all phenomena must be completely determined: whether past, present or future. +The French mechanist and determinist Pierre Simon de Laplace formulated the sweeping implications of this thesis by saying: + +We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. +One of the first and most famous expositions of universal mechanism is found in the opening passages of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). What is less frequently appreciated is that René Descartes was a staunch mechanist, though today, in the philosophy of mind, he is remembered for introducing the mind–body problem in terms of dualism and physicalism. +Descartes was a substance dualist, and argued that reality was composed of two radically different types of substance: extended matter, on the one hand, and immaterial mind, on the other. Descartes argued that one cannot explain the conscious mind in terms of the spatial dynamics of mechanistic bits of matter cannoning off each other. Nevertheless, his understanding of biology was thoroughly mechanistic in nature: + +I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels. +His scientific work was based on the traditional mechanistic understanding that animals and humans are completely mechanistic automata. Descartes' dualism was motivated by the seeming impossibility that mechanical dynamics could yield mental experiences. +Isaac Newton ushered in a much weaker acceptation of mechanism that tolerated the antithetical, and as yet inexplicable, action at a distance of gravity. However, his work seemed to successfully predict the motion of both celestial and terrestrial bodies according to that principle, and the generation of philosophers who were inspired by Newton's example carried the mechanist banner nonetheless. Chief among them were French philosophers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Denis Diderot (see also: French materialism). \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2cf887259 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Mechanism (philosophy)" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:50.247370+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Criticism === +In modern times, philosophers have raised several concerns regarding the manner in which both Descartes and Newton utilized the "scientific methodology" in their formulations of a universal mechanistic metaphysics. Noteworthy is Colin Murray Turbayne, who argued that both Descartes and Newton fell victim to at least three procedural errors while developing a doctrine of universal mechanism. +Their first error emerged with the claim that the certainty which characterizes the use of deductive reasoning in the development of the relationship between theorems and principles is present within the natural world in the form of active principles which serve as catalysts for a causal chain of events. In the process, however, both philosophers exported a characteristic of the process of explaining natural events into the natural world itself and suddenly, "nature... obeys the logic of the deductive method. +In addition, Descartes and Newton artificially bifurcated the natural world into "causes" (such as "gravity", "resistance" or "attraction") and "effects" (such as "bodies at rest" and "bodies in motion") while asserting that any deductive explanation of the natural world must be founded upon causal relationships. By claiming, however, that causal "laws" or "forces" are inherent within the natural world, both Descartes and Newton violated a central tenant of their own scientific method, which calls for direct observational evidence of the presence of such agents. +Their third procedural error, rests with an apriori assumption that all applications of the scientific method must rely upon the use of calculation in order to deduce conclusions. While the use of differential equations is clearly a useful aspect of the scientific method, it is not necessarily the sole definitive characteristic of the development of theorems and conclusions through deductive reasoning. Turbayne notes that to claim otherwise is equivalent to embracing an unnecessarily restrictive definition of the scientific method per se. + +== Anthropic mechanism == + +The thesis in anthropic mechanism is not that everything can be completely explained in mechanical terms (although some anthropic mechanists may also believe that), but rather that everything about human beings can be completely explained in mechanical terms, as surely as can everything about clocks or the internal combustion engine. +One of the chief obstacles that all mechanistic theories have faced is providing a mechanistic explanation of the human mind; Descartes, for one, endorsed dualism in spite of endorsing a completely mechanistic conception of the material world because he argued that mechanism and the notion of a mind are logically incompatible. Hobbes, on the other hand, conceived of the mind and the will as purely mechanistic, completely explicable in terms of the effects of perception and the pursuit of desire, which in turn he held to be completely explicable in terms of the materialistic operations of the nervous system. Following Hobbes, other mechanists argued for a thoroughly mechanistic explanation of the mind, with one of the most influential and controversial expositions of the doctrine being offered by Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his Man a Machine (1748). +The main points of debate between anthropic mechanists and anti-mechanists are mainly occupied with two topics: the mind—consciousness, in particular—and free will. Anti-mechanists argue that anthropic mechanism is incompatible with our commonsense intuitions: in philosophy of mind they argue that if matter is devoid of mental properties, then the phenomenon of consciousness cannot be explained by mechanistic principles acting on matter. In metaphysics, anti-mechanists argue that anthropic mechanism implies determinism about human action, which is incompatible with our experience of free will. Contemporary philosophers who have argued for this position include Norman Malcolm and David Chalmers. +Anthropic mechanists typically respond in one of two ways. In the first, they agree with anti-mechanists that mechanism conflicts with some of our commonsense intuitions, but go on to argue that said intuitions are simply mistaken and need to be revised. Down this path lies eliminative materialism in philosophy of mind, and hard determinism on the question of free will. This option is accepted by the eliminative materialist philosopher Paul Churchland. Some have questioned how eliminative materialism is compatible with the freedom of will apparently required for anyone (including its adherents) to make truth claims. The second option, common amongst philosophers who adopt anthropic mechanism, is to argue that the arguments given for incompatibility are specious: whatever it is we mean by "consciousness" and "free will" must be fully compatible with a mechanistic understanding of the human mind and will. As a result, they tend to argue for one or another non-eliminativist physicalist theory of mind, and for compatibilism on the question of free will. Contemporary philosophers who have argued for this sort of account include J. J. C. Smart and Daniel Dennett. + +=== Gödelian arguments === +Some scholars have debated over what, if anything, Gödel's incompleteness theorems imply about anthropic mechanism. Much of the debate centers on whether the human mind is equivalent to a Turing machine, or by the Church-Turing thesis, any finite machine at all. If it is, and if the machine is consistent, then Gödel's incompleteness theorems would apply to it. +Gödelian arguments claim that a system of human mathematicians (or some idealization of human mathematicians) is both consistent and powerful enough to recognize its own consistency. Since this is impossible for a Turing machine, the Gödelian concludes that human reasoning must be non-mechanical. +However, the modern consensus in the scientific and mathematical community is that actual human reasoning is inconsistent: any consistent "idealized version" H of human reasoning would logically be forced to adopt a healthy but counter-intuitive open-minded skepticism about the consistency of H (otherwise H is provably inconsistent); and that Gödel's theorems do not lead to any valid argument against mechanism. This consensus that Gödelian anti-mechanist arguments are doomed to failure is laid out in Artificial Intelligence: "any attempt to utilize [Gödel's incompleteness results] to attack the computationalist thesis is bound to be illegitimate, since these results are quite consistent with the computationalist thesis." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ba5af06e0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Mechanism (philosophy)" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:50.247370+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== History ==== +One of the earliest attempts to use incompleteness to reason about human intelligence was by Gödel himself in his 1951 Gibbs Lecture entitled "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their philosophical implications". In this lecture, Gödel uses the incompleteness theorem to arrive at the following disjunction: (a) the human mind is not a consistent finite machine, or (b) there exist Diophantine equations for which it cannot decide whether solutions exist. Gödel finds (b) implausible, and thus seems to have believed the human mind was not equivalent to a finite machine, i.e., its power exceeded that of any finite machine. He recognized that this was only a conjecture, since one could never disprove (b). Yet he considered the disjunctive conclusion to be a "certain fact". +In subsequent years, more direct anti-mechanist lines of reasoning were apparently floating around the intellectual atmosphere. In 1960, Hilary Putnam published a paper entitled "Minds and Machines," in which he points out the flaws of a typical anti-mechanist argument. Informally, this is the argument that the (alleged) difference between "what can be mechanically proven" and "what can be seen to be true by humans" shows that human intelligence is not mechanical in nature. Or, as Putnam puts it: + +Let T be a Turing machine which "represents" me in the sense that T can prove just the mathematical statements I prove. Then using Gödel's technique I can discover a proposition that T cannot prove, and moreover I can prove this proposition. This refutes the assumption that T "represents" me, hence I am not a Turing machine. +Hilary Putnam objects that this argument ignores the issue of consistency. Gödel's technique can only be applied to consistent systems. It is conceivable, argues Putnam, that the human mind is inconsistent. If one is to use Gödel's technique to prove the proposition that T cannot prove, one must first prove (the mathematical statement representing) the consistency of T, a daunting and perhaps impossible task. Later Putnam suggested that while Gödel's theorems cannot be applied to humans, since they make mistakes and are therefore inconsistent, it may be applied to the human faculty of science or mathematics in general. If we are to believe that it is consistent, then either we cannot prove its consistency, or it cannot be represented by a Turing machine. +J. R. Lucas in Minds, Machines and Gödel (1961), and later in his book The Freedom of the Will (1970), lays out an anti-mechanist argument closely following the one described by Putnam, including reasons for why the human mind can be considered consistent. Lucas admits that, by Gödel's second theorem, a human mind cannot formally prove its own consistency, and even says (perhaps facetiously) that women and politicians are inconsistent. Nevertheless, he sets out arguments for why a male non-politician can be considered consistent. +Another work was done by Judson Webb in his 1968 paper "Metamathematics and the Philosophy of Mind". Webb claims that previous attempts have glossed over whether one truly can see that the Gödelian statement p pertaining to oneself, is true. Using a different formulation of Gödel's theorems, namely, that of Raymond Smullyan and Emil Post, Webb shows one can derive convincing arguments for oneself of both the truth and falsity of p. He furthermore argues that all arguments about the philosophical implications of Gödel's theorems are really arguments about whether the Church-Turing thesis is true. +In 1975, Lewis White Beck further argued that all attempts which have been made thus far to prove that mankind is merely "a cog in the machinery of the world" are futile at best and fundamentally irrational in nature by citing a reductio ad absurdum argument. In his book The Actor and the Spectator he avoids the temptation to present an alternative rational argument in support of the mechanistic theory. Instead, he argues that the theory by its very nature is "self-stulifying" and should be accompanied by a "self-exemption clause". This is due to the fact that if mechanistic theories are objectively true, mankind could never acquire knowledge of them or even establish their veracity. This is due to the fact that machines lack the capacity of human imagination by their very nature and are, as a consequence, totally incapable of formulating such a theory in the first place. As Beck patiently reminds his readers, "If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book". +Later, Roger Penrose entered the fray, providing somewhat novel anti-mechanist arguments in his books, The Emperor's New Mind (1989) [ENM] and Shadows of the Mind (1994) [SM]. These books have proved highly controversial. Martin Davis responded to ENM in his paper "Is Mathematical Insight Algorithmic?" (ps), where he argues that Penrose ignores the issue of consistency. Solomon Feferman gives a critical examination of SM in his paper "Penrose's Gödelian argument." The response of the scientific community to Penrose's arguments has been negative, with one group of scholars calling Penrose's repeated attempts to form a persuasive Gödelian argument "a kind of intellectual shell game, in which a precisely defined notion to which a mathematical result applies ... is switched for a vaguer notion". +A Gödel-based anti-mechanism argument can be found in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, though Hofstadter is widely viewed as a known skeptic of such arguments: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..128516b54 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Mechanism (philosophy)" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_(philosophy)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:50.247370+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Looked at this way, Gödel's proof suggests – though by no means does it prove! – that there could be some high-level way of viewing the mind/brain, involving concepts which do not appear on lower levels, and that this level might have explanatory power that does not exist – not even in principle – on lower levels. It would mean that some facts could be explained on the high level quite easily, but not on lower levels at all. No matter how long and cumbersome a low-level statement were made, it would not explain the phenomena in question. +It is analogous to the fact that, if you make derivation after derivation in Peano arithmetic, no matter how long and cumbersome you make them, you will never come up with one for G – despite the fact that on a higher level, you can see that the Gödel sentence is true. +What might such high-level concepts be? It has been proposed for eons, by various holistically or "soulistically" inclined scientists and humanists that consciousness is a phenomenon that escapes explanation in terms of brain components; so here is a candidate at least. There is also the ever-puzzling notion of free will. So perhaps these qualities could be "emergent" in the sense of requiring explanations which cannot be furnished by the physiology alone. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== External links == +An overview of attempts to define "life" +de Munnynck, Mark P. (1911). "Mechanism" . Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 10. +Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "The Lucas-Penrose Argument about Gödel's Theorem". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658. +"The Problem of Mechanism" by David L. Schindler (from Beyond Mechanism) – contrasts the Aristotelian and Cartesian views of nature and how the latter engendered the mechanical philosophy \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f439ece8c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Medical uses of silver" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:26.599044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The medical uses of silver include its use in wound dressings, creams, and as an antibiotic coating on medical devices. Wound dressings containing silver sulfadiazine or silver nanomaterials may be used to treat external infections. The limited evidence available shows that silver coatings on endotracheal breathing tubes may reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia. There is tentative evidence that using silver-alloy indwelling catheters for short-term catheterizing will reduce the risk of catheter-acquired urinary tract infections. +Silver generally has low toxicity, and minimal risk is expected when silver is used in approved medical applications. Alternative medicine products such as colloidal silver are controversial. + +== Mechanism of action == +Silver and most silver compounds have an oligodynamic effect and are toxic for bacteria, algae, and fungi in vitro. The antibacterial action of silver is dependent on the silver ion. The effectiveness of silver compounds as an antiseptic is based on the ability of the biologically active silver ion (Ag+) to irreversibly damage key enzyme systems in the cell membranes of pathogens. The antibacterial action of silver has long been known to be enhanced by the presence of an electric field. Applying an electric current across silver electrodes enhances antibiotic action at the anode, likely due to the release of silver into the bacterial culture. The antibacterial action of electrodes coated with silver nanostructures is greatly improved in the presence of an electric field. +Silver, used as a topical antiseptic, is incorporated by bacteria it kills. Thus dead bacteria may be the source of silver that may kill additional bacteria. + +== Medical uses == + +=== Antibacterial cream === + +Silver sulfadiazine (SSD) is a topical antibiotic used in partial thickness and full thickness burns to prevent infection. It was discovered in the 1960s, and was the standard topical antimicrobial for burn wounds for decades. +However systemic reviews in 2014, 2017 and 2018 concluded that more modern treatments, both with and without silver, show better results for wound healing and infection-prevention than silver sulfadiazine, and therefore SSD is no longer generally recommended. +It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a number of topical preparations of silver sulfadiazine for treatment of second-degree and third-degree burns. + +=== Dressings === +Despite its widespread use, there is only mixed evidence that silver in dressings has any benefit. A 2018 Cochrane review found that silver-containing dressings may increase the probability of healing for venous leg ulcers. +A number of wound dressings containing silver as an anti-bacterial have been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, silver-containing dressings may cause staining, and in some cases tingling sensations as well. + +=== Endotracheal tubes === +A 2015 systematic review concluded that the limited evidence available indicates that using silver-coated endotracheal breathing tubes reduces the risk of contracting ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), especially during the initial days of utilisation. A 2014 study concluded that using silver-coated endotracheal tubes will help to prevent VAP and that this may save on hospital costs. A 2012 systematic review of randomized controlled trials concluded that the limited evidence available indicates that using silver-coated endotracheal tubes will reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia, microbiologic burden, and device-related adverse events among adult patients. Another 2012 review agreed that the use of silver-coated endotracheal tubes reduces the prevalence of VAP in intubated patients, but cautioned that this on its own is not sufficient to prevent infection. They also suggested that more research is needed to establish the cost-effectiveness of the treatment. Another 2012 study agreed that there is evidence that endotracheal tubes coated with silver may reduce the incidence of ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) and delay its onset, but concluded that no benefit was seen in the duration of intubation, the duration of stay in intensive care or the mortality rate. They also raised concerns surrounding the unblinded nature of some of the studies then available. +The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2007 cleared an endotracheal tube with a fine coat of silver to reduce the risk of ventilator-associated pneumonia. + +=== Catheters === +A 2014 systemic review concluded that using silver alloy-coated catheters showed no significant difference in incidences of symptomatic Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI) versus using standard catheters, although silver-alloy catheters seemed to cause less discomfort to patients. These catheters are associated with greater cost than other catheters. A 2014 Multicenter Cohort Study found that using a silver-alloy hydrogel urinary catheter did reduce symptomatic Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection (CAUTI) occurrences as defined by both NHSN and clinical criteria. A 2011 critical analysis of eight studies found a consistent pattern which supported using silver-alloy urinary catheters over uncoated catheters to reduce infections in adult patients, and concluded that using silver-alloy catheters would significantly improve patient care. A 2007 systemic review concluded that using silver-alloy indwelling catheters for short-term catheterizing will reduce the risk of catheter-acquired urinary tract infection, but called for further studies to evaluate the economic benefits of using the expensive silver alloy-catheters. Two systemic reviews in 2004 found that using silver-alloy catheters reduced asymptomatic and symptomatic bacteriuria more than standard catheters, for patients who were catheterised for a short time. A 2000 randomized crossover study found that using the more expensive silver-coated catheter may result in cost savings by preventing nosocomial UTI infections, and another 2000 study found that using silver alloy catheters for short-term urinary catheterization reduces the incidence of symptomatic UTI and bacteremia compared with standard catheters, and may thus yield cost savings. +A 2017 study found that a combination of chlorhexidine and silver-sulfadiazine (CSS) used to coat central venous catheters (CVC) reduces the rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections. However, they also found that the efficacy of the CSS-CVC coating was progressively eroded by blood-flow, and that the antibacterial function was lost after 48 hours. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cdf85fe4a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Medical uses of silver" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:26.599044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Conjugations with existing drugs === +Research in 2018 into the treatment of central nervous system infections caused by free-living amoebae such as Naegleria fowleri and Acanthamoeba castellanii, tested the effectiveness of existing drugs as well as the effectiveness of the same drugs when they were conjugated with silver nanoparticles. In vitro tests demonstrated more potent amoebicidal effects for the drugs when conjugated with silver nanoparticles as compared to the same drugs when used alone. They also found that conjugating the drugs with silver nanoparticles enhanced their anti-acanthamoebic activity. + +=== X-ray film === +Silver-halide imaging plates used with X-ray imaging were the standard before digital techniques arrived; these function essentially the same as other silver-halide photographic films, although for x-ray use the developing process is very simple and takes only a few minutes. Silver x-ray film remains popular for its accuracy, and cost effectiveness, particularly in developing countries, where digital X-ray technology is usually not available. + +=== Other uses === +Silver compounds have been used in external preparations as antiseptics, including both silver nitrate and silver proteinate. Before the development of antibiotics, Credé's prophylaxis used a 2% solution of silver nitrate to prevent neonatal conjunctivitis, which used to account for half of all cases of blindness in Europe. The original procedure called for a 2% silver nitrate solution administered immediately after birth, as Credé erroneously believed that a 1% solution was ineffective due to a previous study by Hecker; however, this was eventually corrected and reduced back down to a 1% solution to reduce chemical irritation to the newborn's eyes. +Silver nitrate is also sometimes used in dermatology in solid stick form as a caustic ("lunar caustic") to treat certain skin conditions, such as corns and warts. +Silver nitrate is also used in certain laboratory procedures to stain cells. As it turns them permanently a dark-purple/black color, in doing so increasing individual cells' visibility under a microscope and allowing for differentiation between cells, or identification of irregularities. +Silver is also used in bone prostheses and cardiac devices. In reconstructive hip and knee surgery, silver-coated titanium prostheses are indicated in cases of recalcitrant prosthetic joint infections. Silver diammine fluoride appears to be an effective intervention to reduce dental caries (tooth decay). Silver is also a component in dental amalgam. +Silver acetate has been used as a potential aid to help stop smoking; a review of the literature in 2012, however, found no effect of silver acetate on smoking cessation at a six-month endpoint and if there is an effect it would be small. Silver has also been used in cosmetics, intended to enhance antimicrobial effects and the preservation of ingredients. + +== Adverse effects == + +Though toxicity of silver is low, the human body has no biological use for silver and when inhaled, ingested, injected, or applied topically, silver can accumulate irreversibly in the body, particularly in the skin, and chronic use combined with exposure to sunlight can result in a disfiguring condition known as argyria in which the skin becomes blue or blue-gray. Localized argyria can occur as a result of topical use of silver-containing creams and solutions, while the ingestion, inhalation, or injection can result in generalized argyria. Preliminary reports of treatment with laser therapy have been reported. These laser treatments are painful and general anesthesia is required. A similar laser treatment has been used to clear silver particles from the eye, a condition related to argyria called argyrosis. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) describes argyria as a "cosmetic problem". +One incident of argyria came to the public's attention in 2008, when a man named Paul Karason, whose skin turned blue from using colloidal silver for over 10 years to treat dermatitis, appeared on NBC's Today show. Karason died in 2013 at the age of 62 after a heart attack. Another example is Montana politician Stan Jones whose purposeful consumption of colloidal silver was a self-prescribed measure he undertook in response to his fears that the Y2K problem would make antibiotics unavailable, an event that did not occur. +Colloidal silver may interact with some prescription medications, reducing the absorption of some antibiotics and thyroxine, among others. +Some people are allergic to silver, and the use of treatments and medical devices containing silver is contraindicated for such people. Although medical devices containing silver are widely used in hospitals, no thorough testing and standardization of these products has yet been undertaken. + +== Water purification == +Electrolytically dissolved silver has been used as a water disinfecting agent, for example, the drinking water supplies of the Russian Mir orbital station and the International Space Station. Many modern hospitals filter hot water through copper-silver filters to defeat MRSA and legionella infections. The World Health Organization (WHO) includes silver in a colloidal state produced by electrolysis of silver electrodes in water, and colloidal silver in water filters as two of a number of water disinfection methods specified to provide safe drinking water in developing countries. Along these lines, a ceramic filtration system coated with silver particles has been created by Ron Rivera of Potters for Peace and used in developing countries for water disinfection (in this application the silver inhibits microbial growth on the filter substrate, to prevent clogging, and does not directly disinfect the filtered water). + +== Alternative medicine == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..77571e6cf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Medical uses of silver" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_uses_of_silver" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:26.599044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Colloidal silver (a colloid consisting of silver nanoparticles suspended in liquid) and formulations containing silver salts were used by physicians in the early 20th century, but their use was largely discontinued in the 1940s following the development of modern antibiotics. Since about 1990, there has been a resurgence of the promotion of colloidal silver as a dietary supplement (used internally), marketed with claims of its being an essential mineral supplement, or that it can prevent or treat numerous diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis, HIV/AIDS, herpes, and tuberculosis. No medical evidence supports the effectiveness of colloidal silver for any of these claimed indications. Silver is not an essential mineral in humans; there is no dietary requirement for silver, and hence, no such thing as a silver "deficiency". There is no evidence that colloidal silver treats or prevents any medical condition, and it can cause serious and potentially irreversible side effects, such as argyria. +In August 1999, the U.S. FDA banned colloidal silver sellers from claiming any therapeutic or preventive value for the product, although silver-containing products continue to be promoted as dietary supplements in the U.S. under the looser regulatory standards applied to supplements. The FDA has issued numerous warning letters to Internet sites that have continued to promote colloidal silver as an "antibiotic" or for other medical purposes. Despite the efforts of the FDA, silver products remain widely available on the market today. A review of websites promoting nasal sprays containing colloidal silver suggested that information about silver-containing nasal sprays on the Internet is misleading and inaccurate. Colloidal silver is also sold in some topical cosmetics, as well as some toothpastes, which are regulated by the FDA as cosmetics (other than drug ingredients making medical claims). +In 2002, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) found there were no legitimate medical uses for colloidal silver and no evidence to support its marketing claims. The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) warns that marketing claims about colloidal silver are scientifically unsupported, that the silver content of marketed supplements varies widely, and that colloidal silver products can have serious side effects such as argyria. +In 2009, the USFDA issued a consumer advisory warning about the potential adverse effects of colloidal silver, and said that "there are no legally marketed prescription or over-the-counter (OTC) drugs containing silver that are taken by mouth". Quackwatch states that colloidal silver dietary supplements have not been found safe or effective for the treatment of any condition. Consumer Reports lists colloidal silver as a "supplement to avoid", describing it as "likely unsafe". The Los Angeles Times stated that "colloidal silver as a cure-all is a fraud with a long history, with quacks claiming it could cure cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis, diabetes, and numerous other diseases". +It may be illegal to market as a preventive or as a treatment for cancer, and in some jurisdictions to sell colloidal silver for consumption. In 2015 an English man was prosecuted and found guilty under the Cancer Act 1939 for selling colloidal silver with claims it could treat cancer. + +=== Fraudulent products marketed during the COVID-19 outbreak === + +The US Food and Drug Administration has issued warning letters to firms including colloidal silver marketers for selling products with false and misleading claims to prevent, treat, mitigate, diagnose or cure coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). +In 2020, televangelist felon Jim Bakker was sued by the Missouri Attorney General (AG) for marketing colloidal silver products and making false claims about their effectiveness against COVID-19. The Attorney General of New York sent a cease and desist order to Bakker and others about peddling the unproven products that were compared to selling "snake oil", and the Food and Drug Administration also warned Bakker about his actions. +Controversial web show host, podcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was also warned by the New York Attorney General's office to stop marketing his colloidal silver infused products (toothpaste, mouthwash, dietary supplements, etc.) because he made unproven claims of its ability to fend off COVID-19. + +== History == +Hippocrates in his writings discussed the use of silver in wound care. At the beginning of the twentieth century surgeons routinely used silver sutures to reduce the risk of infection. In the early 20th century, physicians used silver-containing eyedrops to treat ophthalmic problems, for various infections, and sometimes internally for diseases such as tropical sprue, epilepsy, gonorrhea, and the common cold. During World War I, soldiers used silver leaf to treat infected wounds. +In the 1840s, founder of gynecology J. Marion Sims employed silver wire, which he had a jeweler fashion, as a suture in gynecological surgery. This produced very favorable results when compared with its predecessors, silk and catgut. +Prior to the introduction of modern antibiotics, colloidal silver was used as a germicide and disinfectant. With the development of modern antibiotics in the 1940s, the use of silver as an antimicrobial agent diminished, although it retains some use in medicinal compounds today. Silver sulfadiazine (SSD) is a compound containing silver and the antibiotic sodium sulfadiazine, which was developed in 1968. + +== Cost == +The National Health Services (NHS) in the UK spent about £25 million on silver-containing dressings in 2006. Silver-containing dressings represent about 14% of the total dressings used and about 25% of the overall wound dressing costs. +Concerns have been expressed about the potential environmental cost of manufactured silver nanomaterials in consumer applications being released into the environment, for example that they may pose a threat to benign soil organisms. + +== See also == +List of ineffective cancer treatments +Colloidal gold +Antibiotic properties of nanoparticles + +== References == + +== External links == +"Silver". Drug Information Portal. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Archived from the original on February 16, 2020. +"Integrative Medicine: Colloidal Silver". Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. 10 February 2023. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..171b0cfe8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +--- +title: "Nathan Reingold Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Reingold_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:16.708201+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Nathan Reingold Prize (formerly Ida & Henry Schuman Prize) is given every year to a graduate student for having written an original essay in the history of science. It is awarded by the History of Science Society. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c88302a78 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +--- +title: "Orchestrated objective reduction" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:19.889818+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) is a controversial theory postulating that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons (rather than being a product of neural connections). The mechanism is held to be a quantum process called objective reduction that is orchestrated by cellular structures called microtubules. It is proposed that the theory may answer the hard problem of consciousness and provide a mechanism for free will. The hypothesis was put forward in the 1990s by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff; it combines molecular biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, philosophy, quantum information theory, and quantum gravity. +While some other theories assert that consciousness emerges as the complexity of the computations performed by cerebral neurons increases, Orch OR posits that consciousness is based on non-computable quantum processing performed by qubits formed collectively on cellular microtubules, a process significantly amplified in the neurons. The qubits are based on oscillating dipoles forming superposed resonance rings in helical pathways throughout lattices of microtubules. The oscillations are either electric, due to charge separation from London forces, or magnetic, due to electron spin—and possibly also due to nuclear spins (that can remain isolated for longer periods) that occur in gigahertz, megahertz, and kilohertz frequency ranges. Orchestration refers to the hypothetical process by which connective proteins, such as microtubule-associated proteins, influence or orchestrate qubit state reduction by modifying the spacetime-separation of their superimposed states. The latter is based on Penrose's objective-collapse theory for interpreting quantum mechanics, which postulates the existence of an objective threshold governing the collapse of quantum states, related to the difference of the spacetime curvature of these states in the universe's fine-scale structure. +Orchestrated objective reduction has been criticized from its inception by mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists. These criticisms focus on three issues: Penrose's interpretation of Gödel's theorem; Penrose's abductive reasoning, linking non-computability to quantum events; and the brain's unsuitability to host the quantum phenomena required by the theory, since it is considered too "warm, wet and noisy" to avoid decoherence. + +== Background == + +In 1931, mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel proved that any effectively generated theory capable of proving basic arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In other words, a mathematically sound theory lacks the means to prove itself. In his first book concerning consciousness, The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Roger Penrose argued that equivalent statements to "Gödel-type propositions" had recently been put forward. +Partially in response to Gödel's argument, the Penrose–Lucas argument leaves the question of the physical basis of non-computable behavior open. Most physical laws are computable, and thus algorithmic. However, Penrose determined that wave function collapse was a prime candidate for a non-computable process. In quantum mechanics, particles are treated differently from the objects of classical mechanics. Particles are described by wave functions that evolve according to the Schrödinger equation. Non-stationary wave functions are linear combinations of the eigenstates of the system, a phenomenon described by the superposition principle. When a quantum system interacts with a classical system—i.e., when an observable is measured—the system appears to collapse to a random eigenstate of that observable from a classical vantage point. +If collapse is truly random, then no process or algorithm can deterministically predict its outcome. This provided Penrose with a candidate for the physical basis of the non-computable process that he hypothesized to exist in the brain. However, he disliked the random nature of environmentally induced collapse, as randomness was not a promising basis for mathematical understanding. Penrose proposed that isolated systems may still undergo a new form of wave function collapse, which he called objective reduction (OR). +Penrose sought to reconcile general relativity and quantum theory using his own ideas about the possible structure of spacetime. He suggested that at the Planck scale, curved spacetime is not continuous, but discrete. He further postulated that each separated quantum superposition has its own piece of spacetime curvature, a blister in spacetime. Penrose suggests that gravity exerts a force on these spacetime blisters, which become unstable above the Planck scale of + + + + + 10 + + − + 35 + + + + m + + + + {\displaystyle 10^{-35}{\text{m}}} + + and collapse to just one of the possible states. The rough threshold for OR is given by Penrose's indeterminacy principle: + + + + + τ + ≈ + ℏ + + / + + + E + + G + + + + + {\displaystyle \tau \approx \hbar /E_{G}} + + +where: + + + + + τ + + + {\displaystyle \tau } + + is the time until OR occurs, + + + + + + E + + G + + + + + {\displaystyle E_{G}} + + is the gravitational self-energy or the degree of spacetime separation given by the superpositioned mass, and + + + + + ℏ + + + {\displaystyle \hbar } + + is the reduced Planck constant. +Thus, the greater the mass–energy of the object, the faster it will undergo OR and vice versa. Mesoscopic objects could collapse on a timescale relevant to neural processing. +An essential feature of Penrose's theory is that the choice of states when objective reduction occurs is selected neither randomly (as are choices following wave function collapse) nor algorithmically. Rather, states are selected by a "non-computable" influence embedded in the Planck scale of spacetime geometry. Penrose claimed that such information is Platonic, representing pure mathematical truths, which relates to Penrose's ideas concerning the three worlds: the physical, the mental, and the Platonic mathematical world. In Shadows of the Mind (1994), Penrose briefly indicates that this Platonic world could also include aesthetic and ethical values, but he does not commit to this further hypothesis. +The Penrose–Lucas argument has been criticized by mathematicians, computer scientists, and philosophers, and the consensus among experts in these fields is that the argument fails, with different authors attacking various aspects of it. Marvin Minsky has argued that because humans can believe false ideas to be true, human mathematical understanding need not be consistent, and consciousness may easily have a deterministic basis. Solomon Feferman has argued that mathematicians do not progress by mechanistic search through proofs, but by trial-and-error reasoning, insight, and inspiration, and that machines do not share this approach with humans. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..44323c3af --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Orchestrated objective reduction" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:19.889818+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Orch OR == +Penrose outlined a predecessor to Orch OR in The Emperor's New Mind, coming to the problem from a mathematical viewpoint and in particular Gödel's theorem, but it lacked a detailed proposal for how quantum processes could be implemented in the brain. Stuart Hameroff separately worked in cancer research and anesthesia, which gave him an interest in brain processes. Hameroff read Penrose's book and suggested to him that microtubules within neurons were suitable candidate sites for quantum processing, and ultimately for consciousness. Throughout the 1990s, the two collaborated on the Orch OR theory, which Penrose published in Shadows of the Mind (1994). +Hameroff's contribution to the theory derived from his study of the neural cytoskeleton, and particularly on microtubules. As neuroscience has progressed, the role of the cytoskeleton and microtubules has assumed greater importance. In addition to providing structural support, microtubule functions include axoplasmic transport and control of the cell's movement, growth, and shape. +Orch OR combines the Penrose–Lucas argument with Hameroff's hypothesis on quantum processing in microtubules. It proposes that when condensates in the brain undergo an objective wave function reduction, their collapse connects noncomputational decision-making to experiences embedded in spacetime's fundamental geometry. The theory further proposes that the microtubules both influence and are influenced by the conventional activity at the synapses between neurons. + +=== Microtubule computation === + +Hameroff proposed that microtubules were suitable candidates for quantum processing. Microtubules are made up of tubulin protein subunits. The tubulin protein dimers of the microtubules have hydrophobic pockets that may contain delocalized π electrons. Tubulin has other, smaller non-polar regions, for example eight tryptophans per tubulin, which contain π electron-rich indole rings distributed throughout tubulin with separations of roughly 2 nm. Hameroff claims that this is close enough for the tubulin π electrons to become quantum entangled. During entanglement, particle states become inseparably correlated. +Hameroff originally suggested in the fringe Journal of Cosmology that the tubulin-subunit electrons would form a Bose–Einstein condensate. He then proposed a Frohlich condensate, a hypothetical coherent oscillation of dipolar molecules. However, this too was rejected by Reimers's group. Hameroff and Penrose contested the conclusion, noting that Reimers's microtubule model was oversimplified. +Hameroff then proposed that condensates in microtubules in one neuron can link with microtubule condensates in other neurons and glial cells via the gap junctions of electrical synapses. He proposed that the gap between the cells is sufficiently small that quantum objects can tunnel across it, allowing them to extend across a large area of the brain. He further postulated that the action of this large-scale quantum activity is the source of 40 Hz gamma waves, building upon the much less controversial theory that gap junctions are related to gamma oscillation. + +== Experimental results == + +=== Superradiance === +In a study Hameroff was part of, Jack Tuszyński of the University of Alberta demonstrated that anesthetics hasten the duration of a process called delayed luminescence, in which microtubules and tubulins re-emit trapped light. Tuszyński suspects that the phenomenon has a quantum origin, with superradiance being investigated as one possibility (in a 2024 study, superradiance was confirmed to occur in networks of tryptophans, which are found in microtubules). Tuszyński told New Scientist that "We're not at the level of interpreting this physiologically, saying 'Yeah, this is where consciousness begins,' but it may." +The 2024 study, called "Ultraviolet Superradiance from Mega-Networks of Tryptophan in Biological Architectures" and published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry, confirmed superradiance in networks of tryptophans. Large networks of tryptophans are a warm and noisy environment, in which quantum effects typically are not expected to take place. The results of the study were theoretically predicted and then experimentally confirmed by the researchers. Majed Chergui, who led the experimental team, stated that "It's a beautiful result. It took very precise and careful application of standard protein spectroscopy methods, but guided by the theoretical predictions of our collaborators, we were able to confirm a stunning signature of superradiance in a micron-scale biological system." Marlan Scully, a physicist known for his work in the field of theoretical quantum optics, said, "We will certainly be examining closely the implications for quantum effects in living systems for years to come." The study states that "by analyzing the coupling with the electromagnetic field of mega-networks of Trp present in these biologically relevant architectures, we find the emergence of collective quantum optical effects, namely, superradiant and subradiant eigenmodes. ... our work demonstrates that collective and cooperative UV excitations in mega-networks of Trp support robust quantum states in protein aggregates, with observed consequences even under thermal equilibrium conditions." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..33a3f4cb2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Orchestrated objective reduction" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:19.889818+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Microtubule quantum vibration theory of anesthetic action === +In an experiment, Gregory D. Scholes and Aarat Kalra of Princeton University used lasers to excite molecules within tubulins, causing a prolonged excitation to diffuse through microtubules farther than expected, which did not occur when repeated under anesthesia. However, diffusion results have to be interpreted carefully, since even classical diffusion can be very complex due to the wide range of length scales in the fluid-filled extracellular space. +At high concentrations (~5 MAC), the anesthetic gas halothane causes reversible depolymerization of microtubules. This cannot be the mechanism of anesthetic action, however, because human anesthesia is performed at 1 MAC. (Neither Penrose or Hameroff claim that depolymerization is the mechanism of action for Orch OR.) At ~1 MAC halothane, reported minor changes in tubulin protein expression (~1.3-fold) in primary cortical neurons after exposure to halothane and isoflurane are not evidence that tubulin directly interacts with general anesthetics, but rather shows that the proteins controlling tubulin production are possible anesthetic targets. Further proteomic study reports 0.5 mM [14C]halothane binding to tubulin monomers alongside three dozens of other proteins. In addition, modulation of microtubule stability has been reported during anthracene general anesthesia of tadpoles. The study, called "Direct Modulation of Microtubule Stability Contributes to Anthracene General Anesthesia" claims to provide "strong evidence that destabilization of neuronal microtubules provides a path to achieving general anesthesia". +Computer modeling of tubulin's atomic structure found that anesthetic gas molecules bind adjacent to amino acid aromatic rings of non-polar π-electrons and that collective quantum dipole oscillations among all π-electron resonance rings in each tubulin showed a spectrum with a common mode peak at 613 T Hz. Simulated presence of eight different anesthetic gases abolished the 613 THz peak, whereas the presence of two different nonanesthetic gases did not affect the 613 THz peak, from which it was speculated that this 613 THz peak in microtubules could be related to consciousness and anesthetic action. +Another study that Hameroff was a part of claims to show that "anesthetic molecules can impair π-resonance energy transfer and exciton hopping in 'quantum channels' of tryptophan rings in tubulin, and thus account for selective action of anesthetics on consciousness and memory". +In a study published in August 2024, an undergraduate group led by a Wellesley College professor found that rats given epothilone B, a drug that binds to microtubules, took over a minute longer to fall unconscious when exposed to an anesthetic gas. + +== Criticism == +Orch OR has been criticized both by physicists and neuroscientists, who consider it to be a poor model of brain physiology. It has also been critiqued for lacking explanatory power: the philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote, "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules." +David Chalmers has argued against quantum consciousness, discussing instead how quantum mechanics may relate to dualistic consciousness. He has expressed skepticism that any new physics can resolve the hard problem of consciousness and argued that quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same weakness as more conventional theories. Just as he has argued that there is no particular reason why specific macroscopic physical features in the brain should give rise to consciousness, he also holds that there is no particular reason why a specific quantum feature, such as the EM field in the brain, should give rise to consciousness. + +=== Decoherence in living organisms === +In 2000, Max Tegmark claimed that any quantum coherent system in the brain would undergo effective wave function collapse due to environmental interaction long before it could influence neural processes (the "warm, wet and noisy" argument, as it later came to be known). He determined the decoherence timescale of microtubule entanglement at brain temperatures to be on the order of femtoseconds, far too brief for neural processing. Christof Koch and Klaus Hepp also agreed that quantum coherence does not play, or does not need to play, any major role in neurophysiology. Koch and Hepp concluded that "The empirical demonstration of slowly decoherent and controllable quantum bits in neurons connected by electrical or chemical synapses, or the discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm for computations performed by the brain, would do much to bring these speculations from the 'far-out' to the mere 'very unlikely'". +In response to Tegmark's claims, Hagan, Tuszynski, and Hameroff claimed that he did not address the Orch OR model but instead a model of his own construction. This involved superpositions of quanta separated by 24 nm rather than the much smaller separations stipulated for Orch OR. As a result, Hameroff's group claimed a decoherence time seven orders of magnitude greater than Tegmark's, although still far below 25ms. Hameroff's group also suggested that the Debye layer of counterions could screen thermal fluctuations, and that the surrounding actin gel might enhance the ordering of water, further screening noise. They also suggested that incoherent metabolic energy could further order water, and finally that the configuration of the microtubule lattice might be suitable for quantum error correction, a means of resisting quantum decoherence. +In 2009, Reimers et al. and McKemmish et al. published critical assessments. Earlier versions of the theory had required tubulin-electrons to form either Bose–Einsteins or Frohlich condensates, and the Reimers group noted the lack of empirical evidence that such could occur. Additionally, they calculated that microtubules could only support weak 8 MHz coherence. McKemmish et al. argued that aromatic molecules cannot switch states, because they are delocalized, and that changes in tubulin protein-conformation driven by GTP conversion would result in a prohibitive energy requirement. +In 2022, a group of Italian physicists conducted several experiments that failed to observe spontaneous radiation emissions predicted by the Diósi–Penrose collapse model, but that "Penrose's original collapse model, unlike Diósi's, did not predict spontaneous radiation, so has not been ruled out." + +=== Endogenous ferritin quenches microtubule radiance, which may prevent generation of ultraviolet biophotons === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4e718f577 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Orchestrated objective reduction" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:19.889818+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +While some of the studies mentioned above purport to show superradiance and an influence of anesthetics on decreasing excitation diffusion through microtubules, those studies were performed under artificial conditions that failed to include proteins associated with microtubules like ferritin, which quenches microtubule superradiance. Evidence published prior to those studies establishes that ferritin interacts with microtubules in vivo and is essential for microtubule stability and function. For instance, those studies overlooked that: + +Studies of biophotons in the human body fail to find any evidence of ultraviolet (UV) biophotons. In contrast, at least one of the studies cited above that is relied on as evidence of microtubule superradiance in support of Orch-OR relies on earlier studies of UV biophotons measured in single-celled organisms like E. coli and respiratory deficient yeast as the basis for its contention that such biophotons are present in cells. That study also used UV-vis equipment with a light source that can generate 1020 photons per second, which is not representative of neurons' environment. +Ferritin in the human body absorbs UV from external sources at least in the skin and in the cornea, where the levels of UV photons are much higher than measured biophoton levels of UV even in E. coli and yeast. Endogenous ferritin in neurons would absorb UV biophotons that might be emitted from chemical processes (at levels that are too low to measure), and those UV biophotons would not even reach microtubules to cause superradiance or energy transport. +Ferritin contains tryptophan residues, the same material in microtubules that is supposed to cause microtubule superradiance. According to one of the studies cited above, microtubule superradiance is based on special configurations of tryptophan residues. The failure of that study to consider additional ferritin tryptophan residues in the vicinity of microtubule tryptophan residues means that the study is not relevant to cellular environments that include ferritin (which is basically every cell). As noted above, ferritin perturbs tubulin in the vicinity of tryptophan residues, which invalidates an a priori assumption of that study. +Ferritin has stronger ionic interaction with microtubules than the anesthetics that were used in one of the studies cited above and has electrical and magnetic properties that those anesthetics lack. Even if anesthetics interact with microtubules, ferritin has stronger interactions with microtubules, which may explain why ferritin is able to quench microtubule fluorescence. +In summary, experiments trying to demonstrate microtubule superradiance involved unrealistic levels of UV light and artificial environments, and excluded cellular substances that would prevent microtubule superradiance and energy transport. + +=== Neuroscience === + +Biology-based criticisms have been offered, including a lack of explanation for the probabilistic release of neurotransmitters from presynaptic axon terminals and an error in the calculated number of the tubulin dimers per cortical neuron. +In 2014, Penrose and Hameroff published responses to some criticisms and revisions to many of the theory's peripheral assumptions, while retaining the core hypothesis. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== Sources == +Hofstadter, Douglas (1979), Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid +Russell, Stuart J.; Norvig, Peter (2003), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-790395-2 +Turing, Alan (October 1950). "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Mind. 59 (236): 433–460. doi:10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433. ISSN 1460-2113. JSTOR 2251299. S2CID 14636783. + +== External links == +Center for Consciousness Studies +Hameroff's Quantum Consciousness site Archived 31 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine +Hameroff, Stuart; Bandyopadhyay, Anirban; Lauretta, Dante (8 May 2024). "Consciousness came before life". Institute of Art and Ideas. +Penrose, Roger (1999). "Science and the Mind". Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Public Lectures \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paavo_Pylkkänen-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paavo_Pylkkänen-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..30e1d4860 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paavo_Pylkkänen-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Paavo Pylkkänen" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paavo_Pylkkänen" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:22.201024+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Paavo Pylkkänen (born 1959) is a Finnish philosopher of mind. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Skövde and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He is known for his work on mind-body studies, building on David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular Bohm's view of the cosmos as an enfolding and unfolding whole including mind and matter. + + +== Work == +Pylkkänen's areas of specialization are the mind-body problem, the basis of cognitive science, philosophy of physics, the philosophy of David Bohm and the foundations of quantum theory. +Since 1996 he has been employed at the University of Skövde in Skövde, Sweden, where he initiated a consciousness studies program combining philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. He is currently a temporary university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, at University of Helsinki, where he has regularly worked since 2008. +Pylkkänen has worked and published together with theoretical physicist Basil Hiley, a close co-worker of David Bohm over three decades. Hiley and Pylkkänen together addressed the question of the relation between mind and matter by the hypothesis of an active information within the conceptual framework of the de Broglie–Bohm theory. Pylkkänen's work Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (2007) builds upon David Bohm's ontological interpretation of quantum theory, in which quantum processes are understood as a holomovement in terms of implicate and explicate orders. + + +== Bibliography == +Articles and book chapters +Pylkkänen, P.: Fundamental Physics and the Mind – Is There a Connection? Quantum Interaction, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8951, p. 3–11, 20 February 2015 +Pylkkänen, P.: David Bohm och den vetenskapliga andan, 2010, Beyond belief and knowledge: Thoughts from a dialogue. Liljenström, H. & Linderman, A. (eds.). Stockholm : Carlsson p. 127–142. (in Swedish) +Pylkkänen, P. : Quantum philosophy is philosophy enough, 2010, How we became doctors of philosophy. Roinila, M. (ed.). Helsinki: Suomen Filosofinen Yhdistys ry. p. 151–157. +Pylkkänen, P.: Implications of Bohmian quantum ontology for psychopathology, March 2010. In : NeuroQuantology. vol. 8, no. 1, p. 37–48. +Pylkkänen, P.: Does dynamical modelling explain time consciousness?, 2007, Computation, Information, Cognition: The Nexus and the Liminal. Stuart, S. & Crnkovic, G. D. (eds.). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press p. 218–229. +Pylkkänen, P.: Escaping the prison of language, 2007, Communication - Action - Meaning: A Festschrift to Jens Allwood. E. A. (ed.). Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University +Pylkkänen, P. & Hiley, B. J.: Can mind affect matter via active information?, In: Mind and Matter, vol.3, no.2, Imprint Academic, 2005, p. 7–26. +Books and edited works +Dewdney, C., Pylkkänen, P., Atmanspacher, H. (eds.) Foundations of Physics Vol. 43(4) April 2013, Special issue: Hiley Festschrift. Springer. +Pylkkänen, P.: Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order, 2007 Berlin Heidelberg New York: Springer-Verlag. 270 p. (The Frontiers Collection), ISBN 3-540-23891-3. +Paavo Pylkkänen and Tere Vadén (eds.): Dimensions of conscious experience, Advances in Consciousness Research, Volume 37, John Benjamins B.V., 2001, ISBN 1-58811-125-3. +David Bohm & Charles Biederman (Paavo Pylkkänen, ed.): Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity and science, Routledge, 1999, ISBN 0-415-16225-4. +P. Pylkkänen, P. Pylkkö, A. Hautamäki (eds.): Brain, Mind and Physics, IOS Press, 1997, ISBN 90-5199-254-8. +P. Pylkkänen: Mind, matter and active information: the relevance of David Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory to cognitive science, Yliopistopaino, 1992, ISBN 951-45-6190-2 +P. Pylkkänen (ed.): The Search for Meaning: The New Spirit in Science and Philosophy, Crucible, The Aquarian Press, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85274-061-0. + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Paavo Pylkkänen, University of Helsinki +Paavo Pylkkänen, publications +Paavo Pylkkänen, University of Skövde \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ff58e3c3f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Paradigm shift" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:51.433044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events. +Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). +Kuhn contrasts paradigm shifts, which characterize a Scientific Revolution, to the activity of normal science, which he describes as scientific work done within a prevailing framework or paradigm. Paradigm shifts arise when the dominant paradigm under which normal science operates is rendered incompatible with new phenomena, facilitating the adoption of a new theory or paradigm. +As one commentator summarizes: + +Kuhn acknowledges having used the term "paradigm" in two different meanings. In the first one, "paradigm" designates what the members of a certain scientific community have in common, that is to say, the whole of techniques, patents and values shared by the members of the community. In the second sense, the paradigm is a single element of a whole, say for instance Newton's Principia, which, acting as a common model or an example... stands for the explicit rules and thus defines a coherent tradition of investigation. Thus the question is for Kuhn to investigate by means of the paradigm what makes possible the constitution of what he calls "normal science". That is to say, the science which can decide if a certain problem will be considered scientific or not. Normal science does not mean at all a science guided by a coherent system of rules, on the contrary, the rules can be derived from the paradigms, but the paradigms can guide the investigation also in the absence of rules. This is precisely the second meaning of the term "paradigm", which Kuhn considered the most new and profound, though it is in truth the oldest. + +== History == +The nature of scientific revolutions has been studied by modern philosophy since Immanuel Kant used the phrase in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787). Kant used the phrase "revolution of the way of thinking" (Revolution der Denkart) to refer to Greek mathematics and Newtonian physics. In the 20th century, new developments in the basic concepts of mathematics, physics, and biology revitalized interest in the question among scholars. + +=== Original usage === + +In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn explains the development of paradigm shifts in science into four stages: + +Normal science – In this stage, which Kuhn sees as most prominent in science, a dominant paradigm is active. This paradigm is characterized by a set of theories and ideas that define what is possible and rational to do, giving scientists a clear set of tools to approach certain problems. Some examples of dominant paradigms that Kuhn gives are: Newtonian physics, caloric theory, and the theory of electromagnetism. Insofar as paradigms are useful, they expand both the scope and the tools with which scientists do research. Kuhn, in discussion of theory-ladenness, stresses that, rather than being monolithic, the paradigms that define normal science can be particular to different people. A chemist and a physicist might operate with different paradigms of what a helium atom is. Under normal science, scientists encounter anomalies that cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. +Extraordinary research – When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis. To address the crisis, scientists push the boundaries of normal science in what Kuhn calls “extraordinary research”, which is characterized by its exploratory nature. Without the structures of the dominant paradigm to depend on, scientists engaging in extraordinary research must produce new theories, thought experiments, and experiments to explain the anomalies. Kuhn sees the practice of this stage – “the proliferation of competing articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals” – as even more important to science than paradigm shifts. +Adoption of a new paradigm – Eventually a new paradigm is formed, which gains its own new followers. For Kuhn, this stage entails both resistance to the new paradigm, and reasons for why individual scientists adopt it. According to Max Planck, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Because scientists are committed to the dominant paradigm, and paradigm shifts involve gestalt-like changes, Kuhn stresses that paradigms are difficult to change. However, paradigms can gain influence by explaining or predicting phenomena much better than before (i.e., Bohr's model of the atom) or by being more subjectively pleasing. During this phase, proponents for competing paradigms address what Kuhn considers the core of a paradigm debate: whether a given paradigm will be a good guide for future problems – things that neither the proposed paradigm nor the dominant paradigm are capable of solving currently. +Aftermath of the scientific revolution – In the long run, the new paradigm becomes institutionalized as the dominant one. Textbooks are written, obscuring the revolutionary process. + +== Features == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3f05e7468 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Paradigm shift" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:51.433044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Paradigm shifts and progress === +A common misinterpretation of paradigms is the belief that the discovery of paradigm shifts and the dynamic nature of science (with its many opportunities for subjective judgments by scientists) are a case for relativism: the view that all kinds of belief systems are equal. Kuhn vehemently denies this interpretation and states that when a scientific paradigm is replaced by a new one, albeit through a complex social process, the new one is always better, not just different. + +=== Incommensurability === +These claims of relativism are, however, tied to another claim that Kuhn does at least somewhat endorse: that the language and theories of different paradigms cannot be translated into one another or rationally evaluated against one another—that they are incommensurable. This gave rise to much talk of different peoples and cultures having radically different worldviews or conceptual schemes—so different that whether or not one was better, they could not be understood by one another. +Donald Davidson famously argued against this idea of conceptual relativism, claiming that the notion that any languages or theories could be incommensurable with one another was itself incoherent. If this is correct, Kuhn's claims must be taken in a weaker sense than they often are. +Furthermore, the hold of the Kuhnian analysis on social science has long been tenuous, with the wide application of multi-paradigmatic approaches in order to understand complex human behaviour. +The philosopher Tim Maudlin observes that incommensurability must have limits or "else the need to revise theories would never arise." + +=== Gradualism vs. sudden change === +Paradigm shifts tend to be most dramatic in sciences that appear to be stable and mature, as in physics at the end of the 19th century. At that time, physics seemed to be a discipline filling in the last few details of a largely worked-out system. +In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn wrote, "Successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (p. 12). Kuhn's idea was itself revolutionary in its time as it caused a major change in the way that academics talk about science. Thus, it could be argued that it caused or was itself part of a "paradigm shift" in the history and sociology of science. However, Kuhn would not recognise such a paradigm shift. In the social sciences, people can still use earlier ideas to discuss the history of science. +Philosophers and historians of science, including Kuhn himself, ultimately accepted a modified version of Kuhn's model, which synthesizes his original view with the gradualist model that preceded it. + +== Examples == + +=== Natural sciences === +Some of the "classical cases" of Kuhnian paradigm shifts in science are: + +1543 – The transition in cosmology from a Ptolemaic cosmology to a Copernican one. +1543 – The acceptance of the work of Andreas Vesalius, whose work De humani corporis fabrica corrected the numerous errors in the previously held system of human anatomy created by Galen. +1687 – The transition in mechanics from Aristotelian mechanics to classical mechanics. +1783 – The acceptance of Lavoisier's theory of chemical reactions and combustion in place of phlogiston theory, known as the chemical revolution. +The transition in optics from geometrical optics to physical optics with Augustin-Jean Fresnel's wave theory. +1826 – The discovery of hyperbolic geometry. +1830 to 1833 – Geologist Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology, which not only put forth the concept of uniformitarianism, which was in direct contrast to the popular geological theory, at the time, catastrophism, but also utilized geological proof to determine that the age of the Earth was older than 6,000 years, which was previously held to be true. +1859 – The revolution in evolution from goal-directed change to Charles Darwin's natural selection. +1880 – The germ theory of disease began overtaking Galen's miasma theory. +1905 – The development of quantum mechanics, which replaced classical mechanics at microscopic scales. +1887 to 1905 – The transition from the luminiferous aether present in space to electromagnetic radiation in spacetime. +1919 – The transition between the worldview of Newtonian gravity and general relativity. +1920 – The emergence of the modern view of the Milky Way as just one of countless galaxies within an immeasurably vast universe following the results of the Smithsonian's Great Debate between astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. +1952 – Chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey perform an experiment which simulated the conditions on the early Earth that favored chemical reactions that synthesized more complex organic compounds from simpler inorganic precursors, kickstarting decades of research into the chemical origins of life. +1964 – The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation leads to the Big Bang theory being accepted over the steady state theory in cosmology. +1965 – The acceptance of plate tectonics as the explanation for large-scale geologic changes. +1969 – Astronomer Victor Safronov, in his book Evolution of the protoplanetary cloud and formation of the Earth and the planets, developed the early version of the current accepted theory of planetary formation. +1974 – The November Revolution, with the discovery of the J/psi meson, and the acceptance of the existence of quarks and the Standard Model of particle physics. +1960 to 1985 – The acceptance of the ubiquity of nonlinear dynamical systems as promoted by chaos theory, instead of a laplacian world-view of deterministic predictability. + +=== Social sciences === +In Kuhn's view, the existence of a single reigning paradigm is characteristic of the natural sciences, while philosophy and much of social science were characterized by a "tradition of claims, counterclaims, and debates over fundamentals." Others have applied Kuhn's concept of paradigm shift to the social sciences. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..007197e47 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Paradigm shift" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:51.433044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The movement known as the cognitive revolution moved away from behaviourist approaches to psychology and the acceptance of cognition as central to studying human behavior. +Anthropologist Franz Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man, which integrated his theories concerning the history and development of cultures and established a program that would dominate American anthropology in the following years. His research, along with that of his other colleagues, combatted and debunked the claims being made by scholars at the time, given scientific racism and eugenics were dominant in many universities and institutions that were dedicated to studying humans and society. Eventually anthropology would apply a holistic approach, utilizing four subcategories to study humans: archaeology, cultural, evolutionary, and linguistic anthropology. +At the turn of the 20th century, sociologists, along with other social scientists developed and adopted methodological antipositivism, which sought to uphold a subjective perspective when studying human activities pertaining to culture, society, and behavior. This was in stark contrast to positivism, which took its influence from the methodologies utilized within the natural sciences. +First proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879, the laryngeal theory in Indo-European linguistics postulated the existence of "laryngeal" consonants in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), a theory that was confirmed by the discovery of the Hittite language in the early 20th century. The theory has since been accepted by the vast majority of linguists, paving the way for the internal reconstruction of the syntax and grammatical rules of PIE and is considered one of the most significant developments in linguistics since the initial discovery of the Indo-European language family. +The adoption of radiocarbon dating by archaeologists has been proposed as a paradigm shift because of how it greatly increased the time depth the archaeologists could reliably date objects from. Similarly the use of LIDAR for remote geospatial imaging of cultural landscapes, and the shift from processual to post-processual archaeology have both been claimed as paradigm shifts by archaeologists. +The Marginal Revolution, a development of economic theory in the late 19th century led by William Stanley Jevons in England, Carl Menger in Austria, and Léon Walras in Switzerland and France which explained economic behavior in terms of marginal utility. + +=== Applied sciences === +More recently, paradigm shifts are also recognisable in applied sciences: + +In medicine, the transition from "clinical judgment" to evidence-based medicine. +In Artificial Intelligence, the transition from a knowledge-based to a data-driven paradigm has been discussed from 2010. + +== Other uses == +The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought pattern—a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing: + +M. L. Handa, a professor of sociology in education at O.I.S.E. University of Toronto, Canada, developed the concept of a paradigm within the context of social sciences. He defines what he means by "paradigm" and introduces the idea of a "social paradigm". In addition, he identifies the basic component of any social paradigm. Like Kuhn, he addresses the issue of changing paradigms, the process popularly known as "paradigm shift". In this respect, he focuses on the social circumstances that precipitate such a shift. Relatedly, he addresses how that shift affects social institutions, including the institution of education. +The concept has been developed for technology and economics in the identification of new techno-economic paradigms as changes in technological systems that have a major influence on the behaviour of the entire economy (Carlota Perez; earlier work only on technological paradigms by Giovanni Dosi). This concept is linked to Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction. Examples include the move to mass production and the introduction of microelectronics. +Two photographs of the Earth from space, "Earthrise" (1968) and "The Blue Marble" (1972), are thought to have helped to usher in the environmentalist movement, which gained great prominence in the years immediately following distribution of those images. +Hans Küng applies Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm change to the entire history of Christian thought and theology. He identifies six historical "macromodels": 1) the apocalyptic paradigm of primitive Christianity, 2) the Hellenistic paradigm of the patristic period, 3) the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm, 4) the Protestant (Reformation) paradigm, 5) the modern Enlightenment paradigm, and 6) the emerging ecumenical paradigm. He also discusses five analogies between natural science and theology in relation to paradigm shifts. Küng addresses paradigm change in his books, Paradigm Change in Theology and Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. +In the later part of the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as a buzzword, popularized as marketing speak and appearing more frequently in print and publication. In his book Mind The Gaffe, author Larry Trask advises readers to refrain from using it, and to use caution when reading anything that contains the phrase. It is referred to in several articles and books as abused and overused to the point of becoming meaningless. +The concept of technological paradigms has been advanced, particularly by Giovanni Dosi. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..419ca188c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Paradigm shift" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:51.433044+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Criticism == +In a 2015 retrospective on Kuhn, the philosopher Martin Cohen describes the notion of the paradigm shift as a kind of intellectual virus – spreading from hard science to social science and on to the arts and even everyday political rhetoric today. Cohen claims that Kuhn had only a very hazy idea of what it might mean and, in line with the Austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, accuses Kuhn of retreating from the more radical implications of his theory, which are that scientific facts are never really more than opinions whose popularity is transitory and far from conclusive. Cohen says scientific knowledge is less certain than it is usually portrayed, and that science and knowledge generally is not the 'very sensible and reassuringly solid sort of affair' that Kuhn describes, in which progress involves periodic paradigm shifts in which much of the old certainties are abandoned in order to open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before. He argues that information cascades can distort rational, scientific debate. He has focused on health issues, including the example of highly mediatised 'pandemic' alarms, and why they have turned out eventually to be little more than scares. +One of the early critics of Kuhn, Norwood Russell Hanson criticized Kuhn's paradigm shift theory as being conceptually circular and therefore unfalsifiable. +There is a discussion about genetic fallacy in the concept of paradigm shift and the way in which theories are evaluated. + +== See also == + +== References == + +=== Citations === + +=== Sources === +Kuhn, Thomas (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd, enlarged ed.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-45804-5. + +== External links == + The dictionary definition of paradigm shift at Wiktionary +MIT 6.933J – The Structure of Engineering Revolutions. From MIT OpenCourseWare, course materials (graduate level) for a course on the history of technology through a Kuhnian lens. +Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). ""Scientific Change"". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize-0.md index c5e5dcb91..cab44d8c8 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunge_Prize" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:44.535519+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:19.035070+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-0.md index abede8162..3f5f9ffff 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Award" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:49:05.826527+00:00" +date_saved: 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"2026-05-05T09:28:20.251142+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-0.md index 03dd03f91..c91cbfebe 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-1.md index ec94b518f..fd30d3548 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-2.md index 98e557bbd..319190ab4 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-3.md index 10c0feddc..aa7717c5f 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-4.md index b83134f9b..0d46e828b 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-4.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-4.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 5/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-5.md index d9cbcd055..58fde63bd 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-5.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-5.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 6/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-6.md index eae1ec5d5..6dc61e8c8 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-6.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-6.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 7/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-7.md index 17b72a425..fa8846146 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-7.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-7.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 8/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-8.md index 990b8ef25..65232c7f4 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-8.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science-8.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 9/9 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:08:22.506236+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:52.646108+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..269d9d259 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Planck's principle" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck's_principle" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:53.842625+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In sociology of scientific knowledge, Planck's principle is the view that scientific change does not occur because individual scientists change their mind, but rather that successive generations of scientists have different views. It is named after the physicist Max Planck, who stated a version of it in his autobiography. + + +== Formulation == + +This was formulated by Max Planck: + +A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it ...An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth. +Often the more concise "Science progresses one funeral at a time" is used which was originated by Paul A. Samuelson. + + +== Adoption == +Planck's quote has been used by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others to argue scientific revolutions are non-rational, rather than spread through "mere force of truth and fact". +Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman-philosopher, cites Planck's Principle in support of his views on drastic social change and the nature of mass movements. According to Hoffer's May 20, 1959 journal entry, the successful navigation of drastic change requires "endowment ... with a new identity and a sense of rebirth" as was the case with Moses and the Exodus. Only after forty years in the desert could Moses transform Hebrew slaves into free men, that is, a new generation: +"Moses discovered that no migration, no drama, no spectacle, no myth, and no miracles could turn slaves into free men. It cannot be done. So he led the slaves back into the desert, and waited forty years until the slave generation died, and a new generation, desert born and bred, was ready to enter the promised land. +"All revolutionary leaders, though they fervently preach change, know that people cannot change. Unlike Moses they have neither a handy desert nor the patience to wait forty years. Hence the purges and the terror to get rid of the grown-up generation. +"It is of interest that even in the objective world of science man's mind is not more malleable than in the habit-bound world of everyday life. Max Planck maintained that a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Here, too, you need forty years in the desert" (175-176). + + +== Rebuttal == +Whether age influences the readiness to accept new ideas has been empirically criticised. In the case of acceptance of evolution in the years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species, age was a minor factor. On a more specialized scale, it also was a weak factor in accepting cliometrics. A study of when different geologists accepted plate tectonics found that older scientists actually adopted it sooner than younger scientists. However, a more recent study on life science researchers found that following the deaths of preeminent researchers, publications by their collaborators rapidly declined while the activity of non-collaborators and the number of new researchers entering their field rose. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d806c1226 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +title: "Plate Tectonics Revolution" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_Tectonics_Revolution" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:54.979772+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Plate Tectonics Revolution was the scientific and cultural change which developed from the acceptance of the plate tectonics theory. The event was a paradigm shift and scientific revolution. +By 1967 most scientists in geology accepted the theory of plate tectonics. The root of this was Alfred Wegener's 1912 publication of his theory of continental drift, which was a controversy in the field through the 1950s. At that point scientists introduced new evidence in a new way, replacing the idea of continental drift with instead a theory of plate tectonics. The acceptance of this theory brought scientific and cultural change which commentators called the "Plate Tectonics Revolution". + + +== Response == +In 1975 a paper said that "plate tectonics" gained general acceptance in its field in 1968 and called that acceptance a revolution. +One scientist said that the Plate Tectonics Revolution brought excitement among scientists in the field in the 1960s. +Publications in generations after the event reflected on how the Plate Tectonics Revolution was an early example of data science. +One commentator claimed that the plate tectonics theory became popular and established a revolution in culture even before scientists could confirm some of the claims for which evidence was lacking. + + +== List of revolutionaries == + +Émile Argand +Alfred Wegener +Roberto Mantovani +Arthur Holmes +Felix Andries Vening Meinesz +Samuel Warren Carey +Robert R. Coats +Edward Bullard +W. Jason Morgan +John Tuzo Wilson +Marie Tharp +Frank Bursley Taylor +Victor Conrad +Andrija Mohorovičić +Dan McKenzie + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Mareschal, Jean-Claude (1987). "Plate tectonics: Scientific revolution or scientific program?". Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union. 68 (20): 529. Bibcode:1987EOSTr..68..529M. doi:10.1029/EO068i020p00529-01. +Hallam, A. (1974). A revolution in the earth sciences from continental drift to plate tectonics (Repr. ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0198581451. +Iseda, Tetsuji (December 1996). "Philosophical Interpretations of the Plate Tectonics Revolution". tiseda.sakura.ne.jp. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursorism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursorism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ad3e09172 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursorism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Precursorism" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursorism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:57.307364+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Precursorism (called in its more extreme forms precursoritis or precursitis) is historiographical bias in which a historian seeks direct precursors of present-day institutions or ideas in earlier historical periods, where none may clearly exist. Precursorist historical narratives are anachronistic: cherry picking data and often failing to account for the perspectives of people in the contemporary past. Precursorism is considered to be a form of Whig history, and is a special problem among historians of science. +It is now commonly assumed that historians of science should study past scientific "ideas in their own right, avoiding anachronism and precursoritis." + + +== Examples of precursorism == +The French historian of medieval science, Pierre Duhem, exemplifies several of the characteristics of the quest for precursors of modern scientific ideas. Duhem was trained as a physicist, rather than as a historian; he was French and many of the precursors he identified were French or studied at the University of Paris; he was a devout Catholic and many of the precursors of the theologically troubling Italian, Galileo, were members of religious orders. Most striking among them was the French bishop and scholastic philosopher, Nicole Oresme. +The concept has been applied to those who would find precursors of Darwin in the early nineteenth century, and to those who would find anticipations of modern science in ancient cultures from the Near East to Mesoamerica. Precursorism has recently been identified as a significant factor in some studies of the work of Islamic scientists. +In 2018, Hans-Johann Glock identified precursorism as a tendency among analytic philosophers who study the history of philosophy. He describes the tendency as "a veritable fetishism of alleged or actual intellectual precursors" and "a déformation professionnelle, which afflicts... historians and philosophers". Glock describes a handful of contemporary analytical philosophers as interpreting certain historical western philosophers ahistorically; possessing philosophical beliefs which align with modern philosophical schools that did not exist during their lifetimes. Additionally, Glock recalls moments when living analytical philosophers "resisted attempts to co-opt them into various historical schools [of philosophy]". + + +== Notes == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Saran_Satsangi-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Saran_Satsangi-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dd0e6140e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Saran_Satsangi-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +title: "Prem Saran Satsangi" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prem_Saran_Satsangi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:25.712556+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Prem Saran Satsangi (born 9 March 1937) is the current sant satguru of Radha Soami Sect, Dayalbagh or Radhasoami Satsang Dayalbagh who succeeded Param Guru Lal Sahab, seventh Sant Satguru in 2003. +He is also the founder and first president of the System Society of India, a professional body of system scientists. He holds the emeritus chair from the East of the Integrated East-West Forum at The Science of Consciousness Conferences since 2012. He is the chairman of Advisory Committee on Education (ACE), Dayalbagh Educational Institute (deemed to be university). + + +== Birth == +He was born on the campus of Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi on the day of Indian festival of Holi on 9 March 1937, to Krishna Kumar, a professor of botany at Agriculture College, Banaras Hindu University and Bhakt Saheli. + + +== Education and early career == +He studied electrical engineering at the Banaras Hindu University, now Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, and graduated in 1957. +He was initiated into Radhasoami faith on 13 February 1958. In 1960 he accepted a scholarship at Michigan State University, where he received his M.S. in electrical engineering in 1961. The USAID extended his fellowship for PhD, but Satsangi declined the offer and returned to India in July 1961. He got an appointment as reader in electrical engineering at MBM Engineering College and was appointed to the faculty in 1964. +He, thereafter joined the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 1964. In the initial years, he taught basic network theory (analysis and synthesis), control theory and electric traction courses. He served as assistant professor for 8 years, associate professor in 1972 and professor of electrical engineering in 1973. +He was selected for a Canadian Commonwealth Research Fellowship award. He secured admission as a doctoral candidate at the University of Waterloo with research supervisor Jack B. Ellis in the research field of socio-economic systems. +In the summer of 1970, he went to the University of Waterloo as a post doctoral fellow for three months for joint research assignment with the Department of Systems design engineering and Man-environment studies. During the period, he completed his PhD dissertation in the form of relevant papers. He also attended a short summer course at MIT on transport systems. + + +== Dayalbagh (1993–2002) == +He left IIT Delhi in May 1993 to join the Dayalbagh Educational Institute as its director. He became the member of Radhasoami Satsang Sabha in 1993. During the 1990s, he was involved in education and research in intelligent systems engineering applications to large and complex systems by invoking soft computing techniques and published several papers and produced a number of doctoral theses. +He held the office of Director of Dayalbagh Educational Institute for almost nine years. His primary duties involved academic administration, although he continued participating in systems science research and practice. +He is involved in the research of systemic education and experiences related to material, energy, information, mind, intellect, emotion and the science of spiritual consciousness transcending the one in ancient India and the recent advances in neurophysiology and cognitive psychology. + + +== As Vaqt Sant Satguru (2003-Present) == +On 18 May 2003, a gathering in Dayalbagh of about 25000 representatives of about half a million Followers of Radhasoami Satsang Dayalbagh, from all over India and abroad Acclaimed Prem Saran Satsangi Sahab as the Eighth Vaqt Sant Satguru (Eighth Spiritual Leader) of the Faith. As a Sant Satguru, he preaches the teachings of Sant Mat and initiates thousands of his eligible followers into Surat Shabd Yoga. Under his guidance, Radhasoami Satsang Sabha, initiated the Murar Declaration on 13 June 2010, for forging unity among different Radhasoami communities. +He believes that the theory of spiritual systems is fully consistent with the latest theory of everything of the Physical Universe. + + +== Radhasoami Satsang Dayalbagh == +Located at: Dayalbagh, Agra. Lineage: Shiv Dayal Singh (Soami Ji Maharaj)- Salig Ram(Huzur Maharaj)— Brahm Shankar Misra(Maharaj Sahab) — Kamta Prasad Sinha(Sarkar Sahab) — Anand Swarup (Sahab Ji Maharaj, Founder of Dayalbagh) — Gurcharan Das Mehta(Mehta Ji Maharaj) — Makund Behari Lal(Lal Sahab) — Prem Saran Satsangi(Satsangi Sahab). Dayalbagh was founded by Anand Swarup, Kt. +The present Guru Prem Saran Satsangi is an emeritus professor, physicist and system scientist of IIT Delhi. The 200th birth anniversary of Shiv Dayal Singh was celebrated in Dayalbagh from August 2017 to 24 August 2018. + + +== Family == +Satsangi sahab got married on 11 November 1958 (Deepavali) to P.Bn. Satyavati and they have 2 daughters, Prem Pyari and Dayal Pyari, who are both married. + + +== Research papers == +Satsangi Sahab has published 90 research papers and has attended several national and international conferences. His major contributions are in the field of Applied systems engineering including socio-economic systems such as transportation and energy systems. + + +== See also == +Academics +T. Karunakaran – Ph.D. student supervised by P.S. Satsangi at IIT Delhi +List of University of Waterloo people +Religion +Radha Soami Satsang Dayalbagh lineage +Param Guru Soami Ji Maharaj (1818–1878) +Param Guru Huzur Maharaj (1829–1898) +Param Guru Maharaj Sahab (1861–1907) +Param Guru Sarkar Sahab (1871–1913) +Param Guru Sahab Ji Maharaj (1881–1937) +Param Guru Mehta Ji Maharaj (1885–1975) +Param Guru Lal Sahab (1907–2002) +Prem Saran Satsangi (born 1937) + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6fa983088 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Pseudomathematics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomathematics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:29.008938+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Pseudomathematics, or mathematical crankery, is a mathematics-like activity that does not adhere to the framework of rigor of formal mathematical practice. Common areas of pseudomathematics are solutions of problems proved to be unsolvable or recognized as extremely hard by experts, as well as attempts to apply mathematics to non-quantifiable areas. A person engaging in pseudomathematics is called a pseudomathematician or a pseudomath. Pseudomathematics has equivalents in other scientific fields, and may overlap with other topics characterized as pseudoscience. +Pseudomathematics often contains mathematical fallacies whose executions are tied to elements of deceit rather than genuine, unsuccessful attempts at tackling a problem. Excessive pursuit of pseudomathematics can result in the practitioner being labelled a crank. Because it is based on non-mathematical principles, pseudomathematics is not related to misguided attempts at genuine proofs. Indeed, such mistakes are common in the careers of amateur mathematicians, some of whom go on to produce celebrated results. +The topic of mathematical crankery has been extensively studied by mathematician Underwood Dudley, who has written several popular works about mathematical cranks and their ideas. + + +== Examples == +One common type of approach is claiming to have solved a classical problem that has been proven to be mathematically unsolvable. Common examples of this include the following constructions in Euclidean geometry – using only a compass and straightedge: + +Squaring the circle: Given any circle drawing a square having the same area. +Doubling the cube: Given any cube drawing a cube with twice its volume. +Trisecting the angle: Given any angle dividing it into three smaller angles all of the same size. +For more than 2,000 years, many people had tried and failed to find such constructions; in the 19th century they were all proven impossible. +Another notable case were "Fermatists", who bombarded mathematical institutions with requests to check their proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem. +Another common approach is to misapprehend standard mathematical methods, and to insist that the use or knowledge of higher mathematics is somehow cheating or misleading (e.g., the denial of Cantor's diagonal argument or Gödel's incompleteness theorems). + + +== History == +The term pseudomath was coined by the logician Augustus De Morgan, discoverer of De Morgan's laws, in his A Budget of Paradoxes (1872). De Morgan wrote: + +The pseudomath is a person who handles mathematics as the monkey handled the razor. The creature tried to shave himself as he had seen his master do; but, not having any notion of the angle at which the razor was to be held, he cut his own throat. He never tried a second time, poor animal! but the pseudomath keeps on at his work, proclaims himself clean-shaved, and all the rest of the world hairy. +De Morgan named James Smith as an example of a pseudomath who claimed to have proved that π is exactly ⁠3+1/8⁠. Of Smith, De Morgan wrote: "He is beyond a doubt the ablest head at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it, of all who have tried in our day to attach their names to an error." The term pseudomath was adopted later by Tobias Dantzig. Dantzig observed: + +With the advent of modern times, there was an unprecedented increase in pseudomathematical activity. During the 18th century, all scientific academies of Europe saw themselves besieged by circle-squarers, trisectors, duplicators, and perpetuum mobile designers, loudly clamoring for recognition of their epoch-making achievements. In the second half of that century, the nuisance had become so unbearable that, one by one, the academies were forced to discontinue the examination of the proposed solutions. +The term pseudomathematics has been applied to attempts in mental and social sciences to quantify the effects of what is typically considered to be qualitative. More recently, the same term has been applied to creationist attempts to refute the theory of evolution, by way of spurious arguments purportedly based in probability or complexity theory, such as intelligent design proponent William Dembski's concept of specified complexity. + + +== See also == +0.999..., often fallaciously claimed to be distinct from 1 +Indiana Pi Bill +Mathematical fallacy +Pseudoscience + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Underwood Dudley (1987), A Budget of Trisections, Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4612-6430-9. Revised and reissued in 1996 as The Trisectors, Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 0-88385-514-3. +Underwood Dudley (1997), Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought, Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 0-88385-524-0. +Clifford Pickover (1999), Strange Brains and Genius, Quill. ISBN 0-688-16894-9. +Bailey, David H.; Borwein, Jonathan M.; de Prado, Marcos López; Zhu, Qiji Jim (2014). "Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism: The Effects of Backtest Overfitting on Out-of-Sample Performance" (PDF). Notices of the AMS. 61 (5): 458–471. doi:10.1090/noti1105. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-0.md index 9d9965f9e..90db00933 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:28:27.913494+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:30.208872+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-1.md index b036ff098..1a03602f3 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoskepticism" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:28:27.913494+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:30.208872+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b9a2c7ee4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Psionics" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:31.453514+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In American science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, psionics was a proposed discipline that applied principles of engineering (especially electronics) to the study (and employment) of paranormal or psychic phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, telepathy and psychokinesis. The term is a blend word of psi (in the sense of "psychic phenomena") and the -onics from electronics. The word "psionics" began as, and always remained, a term of art within the science fiction community and—despite the promotional efforts of editor John W. Campbell, Jr.—it never achieved general currency, even among academic parapsychologists. In the years after the term was coined in 1951, it became increasingly evident that no scientific evidence supports the existence of "psionic" abilities. + +== Etymology == +In 1942, two authors—biologist Bertold Wiesner and psychologist Robert Thouless—had introduced the term "psi" (from ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet) to parapsychology in an article published in the British Journal of Psychology. (This Greek character was chosen as apropos since it is the initial letter of the Greek word ψυχή [psyche]—meaning "mind" or "soul".) The intent was that "psi" would represent the "unknown factor" in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, experiences believed to be unexplained by any known physical or biological mechanisms. In a 1972 book, Thouless insisted that he and Wiesner had coined this usage of the term "psi" prior to its use in science fiction circles, explaining that their intent was to provide a more neutral term than "ESP" that would not suggest a pre-existing theory of mechanism. +The word "psionics" first appeared in print in a novella by science fiction writer Jack Williamson—The Greatest Invention—published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1951. Williamson derived it from the "psion", a fictitious "unit of mental energy" described in the same story. (Only later was the term retroactively described in non-fiction articles in Astounding as a portmanteau of "psychic electronics", by editor John W. Campbell.) The new word was derived by analogy with the earlier term radionics. ("Radionics" combined radio with electronics and was itself devised in the 1940s to refer to the work of early 20th century physician and pseudoscientist Albert Abrams.) The same analogy was subsequently taken up in a number of science-fiction-themed neologisms, notably bionics (bio- + electronics; coined 1960) and cryonics (cryo- + electronics; coined 1967). + +== History == + +=== Background === +In the 1930s, three men were crucial to inciting John W. Campbell's early enthusiasm for a "new science of the mind" construed as "engineering [principles] applied to the mind". The first was mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener—known as the "father of cybernetics"—who had befriended Campbell when he was an undergraduate (1928–1931) at MIT. The second was parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, whose parapsychology laboratory at Duke University was already famous for its investigations of "ESP" when Campbell was an undergraduate there (1932–1934). The third was a non-academic: Charles Fort, the author and paranormal popularizer whose 1932 book Wild Talents strongly encouraged credence in the testimony of people who had experienced telepathy and other "anomalous phenomena". +The idea that ordinary people only utilize a small fraction of the (potentially enormous) capabilities of the human brain had become a particular "pet idea" for Campbell by the time he first published his own science fiction writings as a college student. In a 1932 short story he asserted that "no man in all history ever used even half of the thinking part of his brain". He followed up on this notion in a note to another story published five years later: + +The total capacity of the mind, even at present, is to all intents and purposes, infinite. Could the full equipment be hooked into a functioning unit, the resulting intelligence should be able to conquer a world without much difficulty. + +In 1939, he wrote in an editorial in the magazine Unknown, which he edited: + +Is it so strange a thing that this unknown mass [the human brain] should have some unguessed power by which to feel and see beyond, directly, meeting mind to mind in telepathy, sensing direct the truth of things by clairvoyance? + +Along with Charles Fort, Campbell believed that there were already many individuals with latent "psi powers" among us unwittingly, and he took this belief a step further in considering development of such powers to be the "next step" in human evolution. Throughout his career, Campbell had sought grounds for a new "scientific psychology" and was instrumental in formulating the brainchild of one of his more imaginative science fiction writers—the "Dianetics" of L. Ron Hubbard. Campbell's enthusiasm for Dianetics—which later morphed into the Church of Scientology—was red hot in 1949 and 1950, but had considerably cooled by 1951, when he saw Hubbard for the last time. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d757f3cc8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Psionics" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:31.453514+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== The "psi-boom" === +With Campbell's encouragement, or at his direction, "psionic" abilities began to appear frequently in magazine science fiction stories in the mid-1950s, providing characters with supernormal or supernatural abilities. The first example was Murray Leinster's novella The Psionic Mousetrap published in early 1955. Examples of psychic abilities in fiction, whether attributed to supernatural agencies or otherwise, predated the "psionics" vogue. But the editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describe and define a post-war "psi-boom" in genre science fiction—"which he [Campbell] engineered"—dating it from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. They cite James Blish's Jack of Eagles (1952), Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), Wilson Tucker's Wild Talent (1954) and Frank M. Robinson's The Power (1956) as examples. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953) is a pioneering example of a work depicting a society in which people with "psi" abilities are fully integrated. Since the "psi-boom" years coincided with the darkest and most paranoid period of the Cold War, it is natural that many examples of the utility of telepathy in espionage (for example those of Randall Garrett) would be produced. In terms of literary continuity, the editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction point out that "All the psi powers, of course, used to be in the repertoire of powerful magicians, and most are featured in occult romances." +In 1956, Campbell began promoting a psionics device known as the Hieronymus machine. It faced skepticism from scientists who viewed it as pseudoscientific and even as an example of quackery. +Some of the wind was taken out of the sails of psionics in 1957 when Martin Gardner, in the updated edition of his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, wrote that the study of psionics is "even funnier than Dianetics or Ray Palmer's Shaver stories" and criticized the beliefs and assertions of Campbell as anti-scientific nonsense. + +== See also == +Extrasensory perception +List of psychic abilities +Paranormal +Psionics (role-playing games) +Psychotronic harassment +Psychotronics (parapsychology) +Radionics + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (1995). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-13486-0. OCLC 32820856. +Gardner, Martin (1986). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (2nd ed.). New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0486203948. +Nevala-Lee, Alec (2018). Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. New York: Dey Street Books. ISBN 9780062571946. +Raso, Jack (1992). Mystical Diets: Paranormal, Spiritual, and Occult Nutrition Practices. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 0879757612. +Williamson, Jack (1984). Wonder's Child: My Life in Science Fiction. New York: Bluejay Books. ISBN 0312944543. OCLC 10850987. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..625e37716 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 1/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A psychic detective is a person who purports to investigate crimes using paranormal psychic abilities. Claimed techniques and abilities have included postcognition (paranormal perception of the past), psychometry (information psychically gained from objects), telepathy, dowsing, clairvoyance, and remote viewing. In murder cases, psychic detectives may purport to be in communication with the spirits of the murder victims. +Individuals claiming psychic abilities have stated they have helped police departments to solve crimes, however, there is a lack of police corroboration of their claims. Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..17affaa60 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 2/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Prominent cases == +Many prominent police cases, often involving missing persons, have received the attention of alleged psychics. In November 2004, purported psychic Sylvia Browne told the mother of kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, who had disappeared 19 months earlier: "She's not alive, honey." Browne also claimed to have had a vision of Berry's jacket in the garbage with "DNA on it". Berry's mother died two years later believing that her daughter had been killed; Berry was found alive in May 2013 having been a kidnapping victim of Ariel Castro along with Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus. After Berry was found alive, Browne received criticism for the false declaration that Berry was dead. Browne also became involved in the case of Shawn Hornbeck, which received the attention of psychics after the eleven-year-old went missing on 6 October 2002. Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show and provided the parents of Shawn Hornbeck a detailed description of the abductor and where Hornbeck could be found. Browne responded "No" when asked if he was still alive. When Hornbeck was found alive more than four years later, few of the details given by Browne were correct. Shawn Hornbeck's father, Craig Akers, has stated that Browne's declaration was "one of the hardest things that we've ever had to hear", and that her misinformation diverted investigators wasting precious police time. When Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy went missing on 1 May 2001, psychics from around the world provided tips suggesting that her body would be found in places such as the basement of a Smithsonian storage building, in the Potomac River, and buried in the Nevada desert among many other possible locations. Each tip led nowhere. A little more than a year after her disappearance, Levy's body was accidentally discovered by a man walking his dog in a remote section of Rock Creek Park. Following the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart on 5 June 2002, the police received as many as 9,000 tips from psychics (and others crediting visions and dreams as their source). Responding to these tips took "many police hours", according to Salt Lake City Police Chief Lieutenant Chris Burbank. Yet, Elizabeth Smart's father, Ed Smart, concluded that: "the family didn't get any valuable information from psychics". Smart was located by observant witnesses who recognized her abductor from a police photograph. No psychic was ever credited with finding Elizabeth Smart. In the case of the Long Island serial killer, the psychic said the body would be found in a shallow grave, near water and a sign with a G in it would be nearby. Despite the vagueness of this claim (the body was not in a shallow grave, water is everywhere in Long Island, and no sign with a G was nearby) the New York Post stated that the "Psychic Nailed it!". Describing the case, skeptic and author Benjamin Radford wrote: "more surprising than the psychic's failure is the fact that this information was described as an amazing success on over 70,000 websites without anyone realizing that she was completely wrong". A body was located in the US by psychic Annette Martin. Dennis Prado, a retired US paratrooper, had gone missing from his apartment and police had been unable to locate his whereabouts. With no further leads, the chief investigating officer, Fernando Realyvasquez, a sergeant with the Pacifica (California) Police, contacted psychic detective Annette Martin. Prado had lived near a large forest, some 2000 square miles. Martin was given a map, she circled a small spot on the map, about the size of two city blocks. She said that Prado had struggled for breath, had died, and his body would be there within the indicated area. She described the path he took, and where the body would be found. Although the area had been searched before and Prado had not been found, a search and rescue officer initiated a new search with the help of a search dog, as Martin suggested "A search dog is going to find him." They found the body covered with dirt at the location, as Martin had indicated. While the body had deteriorated, there was no evidence that he had been attacked and it is thought that he had likely died of natural causes, as she also indicated. However, when Joe Nickell, a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, was shown tapes of Martin at work, he stated he was "underwhelmed". Regarding the Prado case, he noted that "What she did was very shrewdly ask all kinds of questions of that police officer, who helped her even further and told her all kinds of things. It's probably perfectly sincere, not an act. But it's just the facility of a highly imaginative and emotional person and doesn't mean anything scientifically". In August 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to have seen the location of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, in her dream. The missing child's disappearance was being investigated by police. She took them to a location where a dead body was found, however it was of an adult woman and not the body of the child. In Sydney, Australia, in 1996, a Belgian-born Sydney psychic, Phillipe Durant was approached by the fiancé of missing Paula Brown to help locate her. Durante told police the location of the body of Brown. She was found less than two kilometres from the spot he had indicated in Port Botany, New South Wales, by a lorry driver who came across the body. "Even though the body was discovered purely by chance, the speculation by a clairvoyant appears to have been uncannily accurate", a police spokeswoman conceded. Durant had used a plumb bob and a grid map, combined with some hair from the victim. In 2001, the body of Thomas Braun was located by Perth-based Aboriginal clairvoyant Leanna Adams in Western Australia. Police had initially been unable to find the body. The family of Braun had been told to contact Adams, an Aboriginal psychic who lived in Perth. The Braun family had requested police to do a search based on Adams's directions but they had not assisted. Adams went to Alice Springs, in the Northern Territory, which was 3600 kilometres away from her home in Perth. She took the family members directly to Braun's remains, a spot high on a ridge west of the town, some 20 kilometres out. The remains were not immediately identifiable. Police later confirmed the remains to be his using DNA testing. Noreen Renier claimed to have solved the murder of Kimberly McAndrew, who disappeared on August 12, 1989. Six years after McAndrew went missing, in October 1995 the Halifax Regional Police hired Renier to help. Renier gave the police three interviews which were recorded and years later obtained for review by Tampa Bay Skeptics founder Gary P. Posner. Using psychometry, Renier claimed to channel the murder victim. After a long analysis of the tapes, Posner states that Renier took the detectives on a "wild goose chase". Renier's clues were misleading, vague or incoherent, leading to nothing solid that could be verified. Renier assured the police that the body would be found soon, before Christmas of that year (1995), saying it would be "a nice Christmas present for everybody". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..43051e136 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 3/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +But decades later it has yet to be located, and as of 2024 the Government of the Province of Nova Scotia is still offering rewards of up to $150,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible for Kimberly's disappearance. In 2023, Charlotte Sena was reported missing from a campground in Moreau Lake State Park in Saratoga County, New York resulting in a huge search effort involving over 400 people, including teams from the New York State Police, New York State Park Police, Forest Rangers, the FBI, and other agencies. Suspecting a possible abduction case, the State Police put the family's home under surveillance, and after a suspicious vehicle drew attention of the police, a ransom note was found in the family's mailbox. Forensic evidence was soon matched to Ballston Spa resident Craig Nelson Ross Jr. (born March 17, 1977), who had a previous criminal history and was living about eighteen miles away from the campground where Sena was found safe and Ross was arrested. A segment from WNYT NewsChannel 13 called "Psychic helps police, family of a kidnapped girl" featured Christine Seebold-Walrath, a self-styled psychic medium. In the segment, journalist Dan Levy claimed that Seebold-Walrath was in touch with the New York State Police and the victim's family during the ordeal, implying she helped with the investigation. However, skeptic Kenny Biddle, chief investigator at the Center For Inquiry, contacted the Saratoga office of the New York State Police and spoke to Officer Stephanie O'Neil who explained whenever information pertaining to a kidnapping, missing person, or homicide is released, they always receive many calls from alleged psychics and that police must follow up on every tip. When asked directly by Biddle, O'Neil said that Seebold-Walrath did not provide any information that helped with the case. Ross was later sentenced to 47 years in prison the following year, and was currently confining his sentence at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f66d1b4ae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 4/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Official police responses == +Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases. + +=== In Australia === +Australian police, officially, in general have said that they do not accept assistance from psychics. This was in response to an Australian TV show Sensing Murder in which psychics attempt to crack unsolved murders. +Western Australian Police have a policy that they do not contact psychics for assistance with investigations, however they will accept information contributed by psychics. +An unnamed Australian federal police officer was suspended following his seeking the aid of a clairvoyant in regard to death threats made against Prime Minister John Howard. A federal police spokesman said they do "not condone the use of psychics in security matters". +There are still cases of psychics professing to have trained with the Australian police and failing to provide credible evidence to support qualifications or evidence of being a psychic profiler or intuitive profiler with the Australian police. +While official policy for police forces in Australia does not advocate the use of psychics for investigations, one former Detective Senior Constable, Jeffrey Little, has said police do use them "even though they officially say they don't". Additionally, police in NSW have used psychic Debbie Malone on a number of cases. While no evidence she has supplied has solved murders or missing investigations on their own, her evidence had been used to corroborate theories, and in one case, included in a coroner's brief on a case. Little, in reference to one case she assisted on, felt her description of what happened was "exceptional", other officers also had been impressed by her assistance, while yet other NSW officers felt she had not helped solve any cases. Sergeant Gae Crea and Detective Sergeant Damian Loone, state that she did not give them anything the police and the public didn't already know. Crea recounts "I've dealt with a lot of psychics, but no one has ever said, 'I can see where the body is buried and I'll take you there'". + +=== In New Zealand === +New Zealand police have said "spiritual communications were not considered a creditable foundation for investigation". + +=== In the United Kingdom === +In 2006, 28 British police forces responded to a query from the Association for Rational Inquiry to say that they did not and have never used psychics, one force saying "We are unaware of any inquiries significantly progressed solely by information provided by a psychic medium." In 2009, when the Metropolitan Police had denied the use of psychics and were then presented with emails suggesting the use of a psychic they made a press statement authorized by the senior investigating officer that was much more ambiguous: "We do not identify people we may or may not speak with in connection with inquiries. We are not prepared to discuss this further." + +=== In the United States === +A 1993 survey of police departments in the 50 largest cities in the United States revealed that a third of them had accepted predictions from psychic detectives in the past, although only 7 departments treated such information any differently from information from ordinary sources. No police department reported any instances of a psychic investigator providing information that was more helpful than other information received during the course of a case; since any information has to be proved, only information matching other evidence could be used. A follow-up study looking at small and medium-sized cities in the United States, found that psychics were called upon by the police departments of those cities even less frequently than large cities. A former senior investigator for the FBI has stated that psychics may be used "as a last resort [and] as an investigative tool with caution" for providing clues not directly admissible in the court of law such as a criminal's character, or the location of dead bodies. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e25b41122 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 5/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Scientific studies == +A number of tests have been conducted on psychics detectives, using control groups, to try to establish any psychic ability relating to crime solving. One of the earliest was carried out by Dutch Police officer, Filippus Brink in 1960. He conducted a year-long study of psychics, but found no evidence of any crime-solving abilities. Another study was conducted in 1982 where evidence from four crimes was given to three groups: psychic detectives, students and police detectives. The clues related to four crimes, two crimes that had been solved, and two that had not been. The study found no difference between the three groups in ability to indicate what crimes had been committed by looking at the evidence. Some flaws in the scientific method were apparent in these two tests. A further test was conducted in 1997, this test focusing on improving on the scientific methods used in the previous tests. This study used two groups, one consisting of three students from the University of Hertfordshire, the other group consisting of three psychics (two psychic detectives and a non-detective psychic who had a media profile and had been endorsed by police due to his abilities). The two groups were shown three objects associated with three serious crimes. They then advocated theories, but once again, no difference was found in terms of the accuracy between the two groups. +To assess the claims of psychic crime-solving, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) established a task force of investigators. The group recorded many failures by psychics to provide useful information to criminal investigators, and felt that psychics may use "retrofitting" (or after-the-fact matching), offering vague clues, and then trying to retroactively fit them to details that are only discovered later. In addition to cases of retrofitting, the apparent use of cold reading (a psychic's fishing for information while appearing to gain it paranormally), exaggeration, and examples where the psychic has used non-psychic sources of information, were also reviewed. +In 2008, while being interviewed for the Skeptiko podcast, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, Ben Radford challenged the host, Alex Tsakiris, to give him the best case for evidence of a psychic solving a crime. As Tsakiris had "repeatedly accused skeptical investigators of purposely choosing the weakest cases", Radford agreed to investigate in depth a case from any period in history, around the world, "that presented the gold standard for evidence". Tsakiris chose psychic Nancy Weber who, in 2006, appeared on an episode of the Biography Channel Psychic Investigators. Weber claimed to have helped the New Jersey police solve the 1982 serial murders of Amie Hoffman and Dierdre O'Brien. The police arrested James Koedatich in 1983 who was later found guilty of serial murder. Psychic Investigators interviewed Weber as well as the two police detectives she worked with, Hughes and Moore, who verified Weber had given them information "she could not have known". Radford spent the next nine months reviewing the case, and he and Tsakiris re-interviewed the detectives as well as the psychic on the Skeptiko podcast. Radford discovered that the detectives had not kept their notes from the case, and that their story had changed since the TV show aired. In fact, he found that their stories now contradicted the psychic's story on several points. A further discovery by Radford using a New Jersey phone book from 1982 found that if the psychic had indeed given the detectives all the evidence she claimed she had, the police could have discovered the killer with a 20-minute search through the phone book. Radford believes that the police and the psychic "simply fell prey to confirmation bias", however, Tsakiris believes Radford's conclusions and publicized information was a "gross misrepresentation". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..70d923204 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 6/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Critical commentary == +In 2023, the podcast, Worldwide: The Disappearance of the Thai Silk King, released an episode featuring a professional skeptic discussing the dangers of psychic detectives getting involved in missing person cases. The episode examines Peter Hurkos and Sylvia Brown, in particular, and categorizes and demystifies psychics and their manipulation tools. +ABC's Nightline Beyond Belief program for 17 August 2011 featured psychic detectives and their involvement with the case of Ali Lowitzer. Typical of missing person cases, families are approached by people claiming they will help bring the missing home. "They told me, I see trees, water, dirt... but it is all very vague" according to Susan Lowitzer a mother whose daughter has been missing since 26 April 2010. Retired FBI agent and ABC consultant Brad Garrett states, "In 30 years...I have never seen a psychic solve a mystery", while Bob Nygaard, a retired 20-year veteran of the Nassau County police department and currently a private investigator specializing in the investigation of psychics, noted that he had not worked with, nor did he know of anyone on the force who had worked with, any psychic detectives. +JREF investigator and mentalist Banachek feels that psychic detectives take advantage of families, "... because of fame and money, [they] step in and try to act like an authority". Banachek believes that not all psychic detectives are frauds, some are self-deluded and believe they are helping, but they "send police on wild-goose chases wasting precious time and resources". Psychic Georgia O'Conner states that Ali is dead, she was tortured and her body dismembered. When asked by ABC's JuJu Chang how can she tell parents this kind of information when she might be wrong, O'Conner replies "I can't let my ego get in the way of what I see". Despite the attention from psychic detectives Ali Lowitzer remains missing from her Spring, Texas home. +No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse. +The Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia's official crime research agency, advises parents of missing children not to resort to using psychics who approach them. Former FBI analyst and profiler Clint Van Zandt has criticized the use of psychic detectives and has stated that "What happens many times is that professed psychics allow themselves the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. After the case is solved, they make their previously vague predictions somehow fit the crime and the criminal." A detailed 2010 study of Sylvia Browne predictions about 115 missing persons and murder cases has found that despite her repeated claims to be more than 85% correct, "Browne has not even been mostly correct in a single case." + +== Belief in psychic detectives == +Psychologists, researchers and other authors have posited a number of possible explanations for the belief that some can provide valuable crime information from psychic abilities. The possible explanations include confirmation bias (or our natural tendency to favor information to confirm our beliefs), wishful thinking (which is the act of making decisions based upon what is appealing rather than reasoned), and retrofitting (or retroactively refining the specifics of a prediction after the facts are revealed). The act of reinterpreting vague and nebulous statements made by psychic detectives is also referred to as the multiple out. Taking advantage of these cognitive limitations is the practice of cold reading which creates the illusion of knowing specific information. Additionally, police detectives and other authors suggest that psychic detectives appear successful due to making common-sense or high-probability predictions such as finding bodies at dump sites or "near water". +While police departments claim they do not seek out or use psychics to solve crimes, they must follow up on all credible tips. If police do not refute this theory then "many in the public continue to believe that psychics are secretly employed by law enforcement". If the police state they do not use psychics then psychics claim that the police do not want to "share the credit" and are just covering up. +Finally, the use of psychics may simply reduce anxiety and fill the emotional needs of individuals who must be experiencing great stress. + +== In fiction == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a23f04b98 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic detective" +chunk: 7/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:32.645851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +There is a long history of psychic detectives in horror and crime fiction, and in other genres as well. One of the earliest forms of the genre was the character Flaxman Low, created in 1897 by mother and son Kate and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard under the pseudonyms H. Heron and E. Heron. The Prichards wrote their stories at the behest of the press baron Cyril Pearson for his monthly Pearson's Magazine, though they were disconcerted to find the tales promoted by Pearson as "real". The collected work was published as The Experiences of Flaxman Low in 1899. +Other literary examples include Jules de Grandin (created by Seabury Quinn), Doctor Occult (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) and Agent Jasi McLellan created by Cheryl Kaye Tardif. +The popular TV show Psych features Shawn Spencer (James Roday Rodriguez), a charlatan paranormal detective helping the Santa Barbara police with crimes that range from robberies to kidnappings to murders. However, the man actually uses an acute sense of observation that he acquired as a child; an eidetic memory; excellent vision; and deduction and reasoning to solve cases, making a running gag of his claim to be a psychic. +In Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently novels, the titular character—a "holistic" detective—is implied to have psychic powers on occasion. One incident involved Gently attempting to scam his university classmates into paying for a set of answers to an exam, supposedly obtained using psychic powers that Gently did not think he had. To his surprise, the answers he provided, which he thought he had produced randomly, turned out to be entirely correct. He was expelled as a result. +Peter F. Hamilton wrote a series of books about the ex-military psychic Greg Mandel. In the series, Greg was a retired special forces soldier created as part of an elite spec-ops unit, the Mindstar Brigade, in the 'English Army', having fought a vicious war in Turkey and helped a rebellion overthrow the People's Socialist Party at home. Having won the rebellion he then retired to Rutland, suddenly being called out of retirement by the rich heiress Julia Evans to use his psychic talents to find the root of industrial espionage against her company, Event Horizon [an organisation that was also integral to the overthrow of the communist government]. The series not only focuses on Greg's abilities, but also the abilities of other psychics created as part of the Mindstar Programme, the effects of social and economic change throughout the 21st century, global warming and rapid scientific advances. Greg regularly uses his abilities both for interrogation and as an offensive weapon. +The episode "Bart the Murderer" of The Simpsons depicts a psychic joining the hunt to find Principal Skinner. +The episode "Cartman's Incredible Gift" of South Park depicts a skeptical view of psychic detectives. +The manga and anime series YuYu Hakusho depicts a teenage boy working as a Spirit Detective: a human who hunts down demons using psychic abilities. +The character Harrier Dubois from Disco Elysium has several skills that can be interpreted as psychic, such as visual calculus which can reconstruct crime scenes. + +== See also == +Fortune-telling fraud +Houdini's debunking of psychics and mediums +Parapsychology +Psychic +Psychic archaeology +Ganzfeld experiment +Scientific investigation of telepathy +Pseudoscience +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience +Marcello Truzzi +Committee for Skeptical Inquiry +Gerard Croiset +Janet Lee + +== Literature == +Richard Wiseman, Donald West & Roy Stemman: "An experimental test of psychic detection". In: Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. 1996, 61(842), 34–45 (PDF) + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_reading-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_reading-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f0e93f39a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_reading-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,87 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic reading" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_reading" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:33.863585+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A psychic reading is a specific attempt to discern information through the use of heightened perceptive abilities, or natural extensions of the basic human senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and instinct. These natural extensions are claimed to be clairvoyance (vision), clairsentience (feeling), claircognisance (factual knowing) and clairaudience (hearing) and the resulting statements made during such an attempt. The term is commonly associated with paranormal-based consultation given for a fee in such settings as over the phone, in a home, or at psychic fairs. Though psychic readings are controversial and a focus of skeptical inquiry, a popular interest in them persists. Extensive experimentation to replicate psychic results in laboratory conditions have failed to find any precognitive phenomena in humans. A cold reading technique allows psychics to produce seemingly specific information about an individual from social cues and broad statements. + + +== Types == +There are many types of psychic readings practiced. Although psychic readings might not incorporate the use of any tools, a professional psychic may have one or more specialized areas of expertise. Some of the more common readings include Tarot reading, email psychic reading, palm reading, psychometry, aura readings, or astrological readings. + + +=== Astrology === + +Astrology is the study of the movements and relative positions of celestial objects as a means for divining information about human affairs and terrestrial events. The position of the stars, planets, sun and moon when one is born are believed to affect one's personality, shape how relationships work in one's life and predict future events such as one's economic success. + + +=== Aura reading === +Aura readings involve the observation and interpretation of auras. The aura is purported to be a field of subtle, luminous radiation surrounding a person. +Psychics have offered aura readings for many years. They claim to have a unique ability to see or sense individual's auras, however no evidence has ever been provided to substantiate this claim. + + +=== Cartomancy or playing card reading === + +Cartomancy is fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. See also Tarot reading below. + + +=== Cleromancy === + +Cleromantic readings usually involve casting small objects and reading them by their position, orientation, and mutual proximity. There are numerous variants used throughout the world. + + +=== Distant readings === +A distant reading, "traveling clairvoyance", or "remote perception" can be conducted without the reader ever meeting the client. This includes letters, telephone, text messaging, email, chat, and webcam readings. +Correspondence readings are usually done via letters, later emails and filling in special forms on psychic websites. +Telephone readings are live readings where both psychic and client hear each other by connecting via premium rate telephone line. In the last years, with restrictions on premium rate numbers, more common are pre-paid callbacks, in which case client leaves his/her credit card details over the phone to an operator, after which gets a call on a specified phone number. Telephone readings became most popular with the growth of live advice TV shows as main means of advertising, and is commonly used by companies rather than individual psychics, due to high setup costs. +SMS and chat readings is a quick question-and-answer format of reading allowing exchange of basic information between psychic and client. +Webcams and online video communication may also be used for this type of reading. + + +=== Lithomancy and crystallomancy === + +Lithomancy readings usually involve especially suitable gems or stones that are immersed in water, or tossed as a set and read by mutual proximity. Its origins are unknown, and there are numerous different methodologies used by various cultures throughout the world. A recently more common variant is crystallomancy also known as crystal gazing. Using quartz as a crystal ball it is stereotypically depicted as Romani fortune telling. + + +=== Numerology === + +Numerology is defined as the study of the occult meanings of numbers and their influence on human life. It is essentially a reading of an individual based specifically upon numerical values such as their date of birth, letters in their names, etc. Numerology can be used in psychic readings. + + +=== Palm reading === + +Palmistry is another popular method of psychic readings, involving characterization and foretelling of one's future through the study of the lines, shapes, wrinkles and curves on the palm. Palmistry does not require psychic ability, as it generally uses cold reading abilities and previous knowledge of the subject. + + +=== Psychometry === + +Psychometry is a form of psychic reading in which the reader claims to obtain details about another through physical contact with their possessions. Psychometry readers often ask the subject for their favorite and most meaningful objects, such as wedding rings, glasses, car keys, etc., for the reading. The belief is that objects which are in close proximity to a person for extended periods of time hold some of that person's 'energy'. This method has been used in attempts to locate missing persons. + + +=== Rune reading === + +Runes are the letters of a set of related alphabets used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet. There is evidence to suggest that they also had magical or divinatory uses. In modern settings, stones or tablets with runes inscribed on them are cast on a mat or cloth to discern future events or path a problem or issue will take. Runes are also used by some witches and other practitioners of divination. + + +=== Tarot reading === + +Tarot cards have been greatly popularized, but can be often regarded solely as entertainment. Traditional decks are available in chain bookstores. New decks also frequently appear in New Age bookstores. Though not requiring psychic abilities, Tarot cards can be used as a psychic or cold reading tool and Tarot readings are common at psychic fairs. + + +== Challenges == +Skeptics have challenged the veracity of the claims of psychic readings, largely through disclosure of the methods. Psychologist Richard Wiseman's 2011 book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There noted the tricks of the trade, and Wiseman noted in a podcast appearance that the disclosure generated negative feedback from the psychic community. + + +== See also == + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Dunning, Brian (29 March 2022). "Skeptoid #825: How Psychic Readings Work". Skeptoid. Retrieved 14 May 2022. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..32745dc55 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic surgery" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:35.006584+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Psychic surgery is a medical fraud in which practitioners create the illusion of performing surgery with their bare hands and use sleight of hand, fake blood, and animal parts to convince the patient that diseased lesions have been removed and that the incision has spontaneously healed. The technique may fool the general public, but it can be observed by experienced stage magicians, who use the same sleight of hand techniques for entertainment. +The US Federal Trade Commission described psychic surgery as a "total hoax". It has also been described as fraud, fakery, deceitful, irrational, charlatanry, and quackery. Even supporters have been forced to admit that sleight-of-hand tricks were "widely used" and that charlatans were common and miracles unlikely. Psychic surgery may cause needless death by keeping the ill away from life-saving medical care. Medical professionals and skeptics classify it as sleight of hand and any positive results as a placebo effect. +Psychic surgery first appeared in the spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the middle of the 20th century; it has taken different paths in those two countries. + +== Procedure == +Although psychic surgery varies by region and practitioner, it usually follows some common lines. Without the use of a surgical instrument, a practitioner will press the tips of their fingers against the patient's skin in the area to be treated. The practitioner's hands appear to penetrate into the patient's body painlessly and blood seems to flow. The practitioner will then show organic matter or foreign objects apparently removed from the patient's body, clean the area, and then end the procedure with the patient's skin showing no wounds or scars. +Most cases do not involve actual surgery although some practitioners make real incisions. The lack of pain upon incision has been attributed to a type of hypnosis. +In regions of the world where belief in evil spirits is prevalent, practitioners will sometimes exhibit objects, such as glass, saying that the foreign bodies were placed in the patient's body by evil spirits. + +== History == +Accounts of psychic surgery started to appear in the spiritualist communities of the Philippines and Brazil in the mid-1900s. The 16th-century explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca records an account, related to him by Native Americans, of a bearded figure known as "Mala Cosa" (Evil Thing), who would take hold of a person, cut into their abdomen with a flint knife, and remove a portion of their entrails, which he would then burn in a fire. When he was done the incision would close spontaneously. + +=== Philippines === +In the Philippines, the procedure was first noticed in the 1940s, when performed routinely by Eleuterio Terte. Terte and his pupil Tony Agpaoa, who was apparently associated with the Union Espiritista Christiana de Filipinas (The Christian Spiritist Union of the Philippines), trained others in this procedure. +In 1959, the procedure came to the attention of the U.S. public after the publication of Into the Strange Unknown by Ron Ormond and Ormond McGill. The authors called the practice "fourth dimensional surgery", and wrote "[we] still don’t know what to think; but we have motion pictures to show it wasn’t the work of any normal magician, and could very well be just what the Filipinos said it was — a miracle of God performed by a fourth dimensional surgeon." +In "...1973, a group of medical doctors, scientists, and parapsychologists visited the Philippine Islands to study a phenomenon that was causing increased furor amongst health professionals ... Filipino psychic surgeons, also known as spiritual/magnetic healers." +Alex Orbito, who became well known in the United States through his association with actress Shirley MacLaine was a practitioner of the procedure. On June 14, 2005, Orbito was arrested by Canadian authorities and indicted for fraud. On January 20, 2006, the charges were dropped as it then seemed unlikely that Orbito would be convicted. +Psychic surgery made U.S. tabloid headlines in March 1984 when entertainer Andy Kaufman, diagnosed with large cell carcinoma (a rare lung cancer), traveled to the Philippines for a six-week course of psychic surgery. Practitioner Jun Labo claimed to have removed large cancerous tumors and Kaufman declared he believed this cancer had been removed. Kaufman died from renal failure as consequence of a metastatic lung cancer, on May 16, 1984. + +=== Brazil === +The origins of the practice in Brazil are obscure, but by the late 1950s "spiritual healers" were practicing in the country. Many of them were associated with Kardecist spiritism, a major spiritualistic movement in Brazil, and claimed to be performing their operations merely as channels for spirits of deceased medical doctors. +A known Brazilian psychic healer who routinely practiced psychic surgery was Zé Arigó, who claimed to be channeling a (fictional) medical doctor named Dr. Fritz. Unlike most other psychic healers, who work bare-handed, Arigó used a non-surgical blade. Other psychic healers who claimed to channel Dr. Fritz were Edson Queiroz and Rubens Farias Jr. Later, one João de Faria, also known as João de Deus, became popular while he operated in Abadiânia, state of Goiás. Faria has since been arrested and found guilty of the rapes of several women. Dozens of similar accusations are awaiting trial. +According to the descriptions of Yoshiaki Omura, Brazilian psychic surgery appears to be different from that practiced in the Philippines. Omura calls attention to the fact that practitioners in Brazil use techniques resembling qigong, shiatsu massage, and chiropractic manipulation. Some patients are also injected with a brown liquid, and alleged minor surgery was performed in about 20% of the cases observed. While Arigó performed his procedures using kitchen knives in improvised settings, Omura reports that the clamping of blood vessels and the closing of the surgical wounds were performed by licensed surgeons or licensed nurses. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..380de8c9c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic surgery" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:35.006584+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== North America === +In the 1970s a specific form of surgery known as psychic dentistry emerged in America. Willard Fuller was the most well known proponent. It was alleged that Fuller could cause dental fillings to appear spontaneously, change silver into golden fillings, straighten crooked teeth or produce new teeth. However, magicians and skeptics have found these claims to be unsupported by solid evidence. One dentist examined some patients of Fuller. In one case miraculous gold fillings turned out to be tobacco stains. In another case a female patient who reported a miraculous new silver filling admitted she had forgotten that the filling was already there. + +== Medical and legal criticism == +In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission declared that "'psychic surgery' is nothing but a total hoax". Judge Daniel H. Hanscom, when granting the FTC an injunction against travel agencies promoting psychic surgery tours, declared: "Psychic surgery is pure and unmitigated fakery. The 'surgical operations' of psychic surgeons ... with their bare hands are simply phony." +In 1975 the FTC stated: + +It has been found that "psychic surgery" is pure fakery. The body is not opened, no "surgery" is performed with the bare hands or with anything else, and nothing is removed from the body. The entire "operation" is an egregious fraud perpetrated by sleight-of-hand and similar tricks and devices. +In 1990, the American Cancer Society stated that it "found no evidence that 'psychic surgery' results in objective benefit in the treatment of any medical condition," and strongly urged individuals who are ill not to seek treatment by psychic surgery. +The British Columbia Cancer Agency "strongly urges individuals who are ill not to seek treatment by psychic surgeon". +While not directly hazardous to the patient, the belief in the alleged benefits of psychic surgery may carry considerable risk for individuals with diagnosed medical conditions, as they may delay or forgo conventional medical help, sometimes with fatal consequences. + +== Replication by stage magicians == +Stage magician James Randi said psychic surgery is a sleight of hand confidence trick. He said that in personal observations of the procedure, and in movies showing the procedures, he could spot sleight-of-hand moves that are evident to experienced stage magicians, but might deceive a casual observer. Randi replicated the appearance of psychic surgery himself through the use of sleight-of-hand. Professional magician Milbourne Christopher also investigated psychic surgeons at work, and observed sleight of hand. On his A&E show Mindfreak in the episode "Sucker", illusionist Criss Angel performed "Psychic Surgery", showing first-hand how it may be done (fake blood, plastic bags and chicken livers were used). +Randi said the healer would slightly roll or pinch the skin over the area to be treated. When his flattened hand reaches under the roll of skin, it looks and feels as if the practitioner is actually entering into the patient's body. The healer would have prepared in advance small pellets or bags of animal entrails which would be palmed in his hand or hidden beneath the table within easy reach. This organic matter would simulate the "diseased" tissue that the healer would claim to be removing. If the healer wants to simulate bleeding, he might squeeze a bladder of animal blood or an impregnated sponge. If done properly, this procedure may deceive patients and observers. Some "psychic surgery" procedures do not rely solely on the "sleight of hand" described, as at least one Brazilian "surgeon" also cuts his victims' skin with an unsterilized scalpel to heighten the illusion. + +== Accusations of fraud == +The physician William Nolen investigated psychic surgery and his book Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle (1974) uncovered many cases of fraud. Tony Agpaoa, a famous psychic surgeon, was detected several times using trickery. +John Taylor has written there is no real case for psychic surgery as the explanation of fraud is highly likely in all the operations. The practitioners use sleight of hand techniques to produce blood or blood-like fluids, animal tissue or substitutes, and/or various foreign objects from folds of skin of the patient as part of a confidence trick for financial benefit. +Science writer Terence Hines has written: + +The "operation" starts as the hand appears to enter the patient’s belly. This is accomplished by creating an impression in the belly by pushing down and flexing the fingers slowly into a fist—the fingers thus appear to be moving into the belly, but are really simply hidden behind the hand. The blood that further disguises the true movement of the fingers and adds drama to the proceedings can come from two sources. One is a fake thumb, worn over the real thumb and filled with a red liquid. Such a fake thumb is a common magician’s implement. Blood can also be passed to the surgeon in red balloons hidden in cotton the psychic surgeon is using, the cotton and its hidden contents being passed to him by an "assistant". The bits of "tumor" can also be passed to the psychic surgeon this way, or hidden in the false thumb... the "tumor" material turns out to be chicken intestines or similar animal remains. The blood is either animal blood or red dye. +Two "psychic surgeons" provided testimony in a Federal Trade Commission trial that, to their knowledge, the organic matter supposedly removed from the patients usually consists of animal tissue and clotted blood. + +== In popular culture == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..849a0b087 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Psychic surgery" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_surgery" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:35.006584+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the 1967 novel by Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the character Fernanda maintains regular correspondence with so called "Invisible Doctors" who practice a form of psychic surgery on her. +In the 1989 film Penn & Teller Get Killed, comedic magicians Penn and Teller demonstrate how to perform the illusion of psychic surgery. +A 1989 episode of Unsolved Mysteries featured a police officer whose mother claimed to have been cured by psychic surgery, only to die shortly thereafter; her autopsy revealed several tumors. The policeman described himself going undercover to feign illness and pretended to desire psychic surgery, having the feeling of the practitioner using sleight of hand to supposedly dig into his tissue, as well as suspecting that the "cysts" and "tumors" being removed from his body were actually ready-made chicken parts. +"Milagro", a sixth-season episode from The X-Files, features a killer accused of using psychic surgery on his victims, killing them in the process. +In the BBC TV series Full Circle with Michael Palin, Michael Palin witnesses two separate instances of psychic surgery in the Baguio district of the Philippines. On raising his suspicion with the medic that it seemed a sleight of hand to him, the medic told him he was a westerner and could only understand the surgery if he had a third eye. Palin assists another medic in a surgery and was told that no contamination happens in this procedure because of the use of garlic. +In the 1993 novel by Ana Castillo, So Far from God, Filipino Dr. Tolentino performs psychic surgery on La Loca after diagnosing her with HIV. +In the 1998 Christmas Special of the BBC1 series Jonathan Creek, entitled "Black Canary", the husband of the illusionist known as Black Canary undergoes psychic surgery at the start of the episode and this form of surgery forms a plot device throughout the special. +In the 1999 movie Man on the Moon, based on the life of Andy Kaufman, Kaufman (Jim Carrey) receives psychic surgery and notices the "sleight of hand," laughing at the irony. He is next seen dead, with his funeral being conducted. +In the TV series Angel, Season 1 episode "I Fall to Pieces (Angel)" features a doctor who practices psychic surgery. +In the 2000 short story "Stalemate" by Ian Rankin, narrator Calumn Smylie attributes his scarred abdomen to a childhood cure by a Filipino psychic surgeon who supposedly extracted his "evil juices" bare-handed. +In the TV show Criss Angel Mindfreak, Season 2 Episode "Sucker", Criss explains psychic surgery as a deception. +In the television show 1000 Ways to Die, a con artist was using this to scam poor country people, only to lead to his death when he used it on a leper from whom he caught the disease. +In the 2012 movie Red Lights Simon Silver, an alleged psychic, performs a psychic surgery on stage. +In a deleted scene from the 2016 movie Deadpool, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) visits a psychic surgery clinic in an attempt to cure his cancer, but upon realizing the clinic is scamming innocent clients into spending their life savings on simple sleight of hand, he attacks and murders the head surgeon in front of the staff. + +== See also == +Alternative cancer treatments +Faith healing +Gray's Anatomy (film) +Health fraud +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience +Psychic +Psychokinesis + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Gordon, Henry. (1988). Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs. Macmillan of Canada. ISBN 0-7715-9539-5 +Nolen, William. (1974). Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-49095-9 +Randi, James. (1982). Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-198-3 +Taylor, John. (1980). Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena Including Psychic Healing, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Precognition by a Distinguished Physicist and Mathematician. Temple Smith. ISBN 0-85117-191-5 + +== External links == +James Randi debunks "psychic surgery" +Turkish Television Brian Brushwood debunks psychic surgery +Unconventional therapies - Psychic Surgery — overview by the British Columbia Cancer Agency +Psychic "surgery" — definition in the Skeptic's Dictionary +Abstract +"Psychic Surgery" (1990) Ca. Cancer J. Clin. 40(3) 184-8 [1] [2] Terte/Agpaoa origins; exposed by Milbourne Christopher and Robert Gurtler. +"Sideshows of Science", David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2001. Reference to "psychic underground" +'Psychic surgeon' a heel, not a healer, police say Globe and Mail story on Orbito's 2005 arrest in Toronto \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomanteum-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomanteum-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..eaa43ef29 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomanteum-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Psychomanteum" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomanteum" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:36.211024+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In parapsychology and Spiritualism, a psychomanteum is a small, enclosed area set up with a comfortable chair, dim lighting, and a mirror angled so as not to reflect anything but darkness intended to communicate with spirits of the dead. + + +== History == +The psychomanteum was popularized by Raymond Moody, originator of the term near-death experience, in his 1993 book, Reunions: Visionary Encounters with Departed Loved Ones. Raymond Moody believed the psychomanteum was useful as a tool to resolve grief. The chamber was kept darkened and illuminated only by a candle or a dim light bulb. Subjects gaze into the reflected darkness hoping to see and make contact with spirits of the dead. Moody compared the psychomanteum to the Greek Necromanteion, and said its function was a form of scrying. + + +== See also == +Catoptromancy – Divination using a mirror + + +== References == + + +== External links == +"Experiencing the Psychomanteum" - Joe Nickell \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..501be3775 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +title: "Psychometry (paranormal)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:37.391641+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In parapsychology, psychometry (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhē, "spirit, soul" and μέτρον, metron, "measure"), also known as token-object reading, or psychoscopy, is a form of extrasensory perception characterized by the purported ability to glean accurate knowledge of an object's history by making physical contact with that object. Supporters assert that an object may have an energy field that transfers knowledge regarding that object's history. +There is no evidence that psychometry exists, and the concept has been widely criticized. + + +== History == + +Joseph Rodes Buchanan coined the word "psychometry" (measuring the soul) in 1842. Buchanan developed the idea that all things give off an emanation. + +The Past is entombed in the Present! The world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical, is likewise true of its mental career. The discoveries of Psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man, as those of geology enable us to explore the history of the earth. There are mental fossils for psychologists as well as mineral fossils for the geologists; and I believe that hereafter the psychologist and the geologist will go hand in hand — the one portraying the earth, its animals and its vegetation, while the other portrays the human beings who have roamed over its surface in the shadows, and the darkness of primeval barbarism! Aye, the mental telescope is now discovered which may pierce the depths of the past and bring us in full view of the grand and tragic passages of ancient history! +Buchanan asserted that his particular psychism would supersede empiric science. He wrote a comprehensive treatise, Manual of Psychometry: the Dawn of a New Civilization (1885), detailing how the direct knowledge of psychometry would be applied to and affect the many various branches of science. + +The thermometer measures caloric (thermo temperature). The barometer measures the weight (baro, weight) of the atmosphere; the electrometer measures electric conditions; the psychometer measures the soul (psyche). In the case of Psychometry, however, the measuring assumes a new character, as the object measured and the measuring instrument are the same psychic element, and its measuring power is not limited to the psychic as it was developed in the first experiments, but has appeared by successive investigation to manifest a wider and wider area of power, until it became apparent that this psychic capacity was really the measure of all things in the Universe. +Buchanan continued to promote psychometry throughout his life and his followers believed that it would revolutionize science in a comprehensive way as "the dawn of a new civilization". Buchanan's work on psychometry was continued by the geologist William Denton (1823–1883). In 1863, Denton published a book on the subject The Soul of Things. Their work was criticized by Joseph Jastrow as based on delusion and wishful thinking. +Others, such as Stephen Pearl Andrews, who promoted Psychometry along with his own new science of Universology, built upon Buchanan's ideas. As a lecturer, Andrews asserted that such inquiries, as paraphrased by an 1878 New York Times article, "demonstrated that the sympathy between the mind and body is an exact science". +In the later nineteenth century demonstrations of psychometry became a popular part of stage acts and séances, with participants providing a personal object for "reading" by a medium or psychic. It is also commonly offered at psychic fairs as a type of psychic reading. + + +== Scientific reception == +Skeptics explain alleged successes of psychometry by cold reading and confirmation bias. +Skeptic Robert Todd Carroll describes psychometry as a pseudoscience. +The majority of police departments polled do not use psychics and do not consider them credible or useful on cases. Proponents of psychometry have argued that psychic detectives have been used by law enforcement agencies on specific cases. However, psychologist Leonard Zusne has noted that "enquiries with police officials [...] reveal that the involvement of psychics has not been very helpful, and that second-hand reports of it are often in gross error." + + +== See also == + +Law of contagion +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience +Outline of parapsychology +Precognition +Remote viewing +Retrocognition + + +== References == + + +=== Works cited === +Buchanan, Joseph Rodes (1893). Manual of Psychometry: The Dawn of a New Civilization. Boston: F. H. Hodges. + + +== Further reading == +Denton, William (1863). The Soul of Things, Or, Psychometric Researches and Discoveries. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. +Nickell, Joe (1994). Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-880-5. +Randi, James (1982). Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-198-3. +Wilson, Colin (1985). The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection. Mercury House. ISBN 0-330-28119-4. +Wiseman, Richard (2011). Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-75298-6. + + +== External links == + +Psychometry Experiment, a project that gave residents in Ontario, Canada the opportunity to participate in a psychometry study +"Psychometry" in The Skeptic's Dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_patterning-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_patterning-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0d89349f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_patterning-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Psychomotor patterning" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychomotor_patterning" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:38.569666+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Psychomotor patterning, rarely referred to as the Doman-Delacato technique, is a pseudoscientific approach to the treatment of intellectual disabilities, brain injury, learning disabilities, and other cognitive diseases. The treatment is based on the largely-discredited theory of recapitulation. +The method assumes that intellectual disabilities result from the failure of an individual to develop properly through the phylogenetic stages, and treatment primarily focuses on non-invasive physical therapy in each of the stages. In one such stage, the homolateral stage, a healthy child typically crawls by turning the head to one side while extending the arm and leg of the opposite side. The patterning treatment is applied to those unable to perform this motion, and involves passive intervention by 4-5 adults who assists the child in an effort to impose or induce the proper pattern onto the central nervous system. +The therapy normally lasts for 5 minutes and is repeated at least 4 times a day. Full treatment programs typically contain a range of exercises combined with sensory stimulation, breathing exercises designed to increase oxygen flow to the brain, and systematic restriction and facilitation designed to promote hemispheric dominance. + +The treatment modality of patterning was developed in the 1960s by Glenn Doman and Carl Delacato. + + +== See also == +The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Ziring, Philip R.; Brazdziunas, Dana; Cooley, W. Carl; Kastner, Theodore A.; Kummer, Marian E.; González De Pijem, Lilliam; Quint, Richard D.; Ruppert, Elizabeth S.; Sandler, Adrian D. (1999). "The Treatment of Neurologically Impaired Children Using Patterning". Pediatrics. 104 (5): 1149–51. doi:10.1542/peds.104.5.1149. PMID 10545565. +Johnson, Dan (July 21, 2004). "Will Baby Crawl?". National Science Foundation. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_hat_therapy-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_hat_therapy-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..91f2ed237 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_hat_therapy-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Purple hat therapy" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_hat_therapy" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:39.791484+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Purple hat therapy refers to any medical practice in which an established form of therapy is mixed with an unlikely new addition (such as wearing a purple hat) and then is claimed to be effective because of the new addition, when in fact the effectiveness is due to the established component. + + +== Origin and description == +The term "purple hat therapy" was coined by Gerald Rosen and Gerald Davison in their 2003 paper, Psychology should list empirically supported principles of change (ESPs) and not credential trademarked therapies or other treatment packages. The therapy is accepted as effective because it is assessed overall; the additional element of the "purple hat" is not tested as distinct and does not need to prove its extra worth. Its invention is followed by the publication of papers discussing it and special training courses. +In addition to introducing unnecessary elements into the treatment, purple hat therapies can hinder the scientific understanding of effective treatments for the condition in question. + + +== Application == +Purple hat therapy has been used as an analogue for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing since it takes established exposure therapy and adds non-science based activities such as eye movement as a "purple hat". + + +== See also == +Fallacy of composition + + +== References == + + +== Sources == + + +== Further reading == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..568fab297 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Pyramid power" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:40.942009+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Pyramid power is the belief that the pyramids of ancient Egypt and objects of similar shape can confer a variety of benefits. Among these supposed properties are the ability to preserve foods, sharpen or maintain the sharpness of razor blades, improve health, function "as a thought-form incubator", trigger sexual urges, and cause other effects. Such unverified conjectures regarding pyramids are collectively known as pyramidology. +There is no evidence that pyramid power exists. + +== History == +In the 1930s, a French ironmonger and pendulum-dowsing author, Antoine Bovis, developed the idea that small models of pyramids can preserve food. The story persists that Bovis, while standing inside the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, saw a garbage can inside the chamber piled with dead animals that had wandered into the structure, noticed that these small carcasses were not decaying and inferred that the structure somehow preserved them. However, Bovis never claimed to have visited Egypt. In his self-published French-language booklet Bovis ascribes his discovery to reasoning and experiments in Europe using a dowsing pendulum: + +I have supposed that Egyptians were already very good dowsers and had oriented their pyramid by means of rod and pendulum. Being unable to go there to experiment and verify the radiations of the Keops Pyramid, I have built with cardboard some pyramids that you can see now, and I was astonished when, having built a regular pyramid and oriented it, I found the positive at the East, the negative at the West, and at the North and the South, dual-positive and dual-negative... +A new supposition: since with the help of our positive 2000° magnetic plates we can mummify small animals, could the pyramid have the same property? I tried, and as you can observe with the small fish and the little piece of meat still hanging, I succeeded totally. + +In 1949, inspired by Bovis, a Czechoslovak named Karel Drbal applied for a patent on a "Pharaoh's shaving device", a model pyramid alleged to maintain the sharpness of razor blades. According to the patent (#91,304), "The method of maintaining the razor blades and straight razor blades sharp by placing them in the magnetic field in such a way that the sharp edge lies in the direction of the magnetic lines." Drbal alleged that his device would focus "the earth's magnetic field", although he did not make it clear how this would work, or whether the device's shape or materials exerted the effect. +Drbal's contention that razors could be sharpened or have their sharpness maintained by alignment with Earth's magnetic field was not new. In 1933, The Times carried letters claiming, "if I oriented my razor blades ... N. and S. by the compass ... they tend to last considerably longer" and "The idea of keeping razor blades in a magnetic field is not quite new. About the year 1900 I found this out". +Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, authors of the paranormal, visited Czechoslovakia in 1968, where they happened upon a cardboard pyramid manufactured commercially by Drbal. They met Drbal, and dedicated a chapter of their popular 1970 book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain to pyramid power. This book introduced both the concept of pyramid power and the story about Antoine Bovis to the English-speaking world. + +== Origin of the term == +Debate continues over who coined the term "pyramid power". Author Max Toth has claimed he coined the phrase, as has Patrick Flanagan. Both authors released books entitled Pyramid Power in the 1970s. According to Toth, this led to a lawsuit by Flanagan against him. +However, the term "pyramid power" in its current usage first appeared in print in Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder's 1970 book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Ostrander and Schroeder claim that "Czechoslovak researchers" coined the term in the 1960s. + +== Popularisation == +The conjectures of pyramid power convinced the Onan Family, hotel and condo developers in Gurnee, Illinois, to build the "Pyramid House" in 1977. +Summerhill Pyramid Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia built a four-story replica of the Great Pyramid, alleged by the winery to improve the quality of wine aged within it. +A religion founded in 1975, called Summum, completed the construction of a pyramid called the Summum Pyramid in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1979. +Pyramid power was used by the Toronto Maple Leafs and their coach Red Kelly during the 1975–76 quarter-final series, to counter the Philadelphia Flyers' use of Kate Smith's rendering of "God Bless America". Kelly hung a plastic model of a pyramid in the team's clubhouse after a pair of away defeats at the start of the series, and each player took turns standing under it for exactly four minutes. The Maple Leafs managed to win all three of their home matches before losing the series' decisive game seven. +It is common in New Age magazines to see advertisements for open metal-poled pyramids large enough to meditate under. The New Age group Share International, founded by Benjamin Creme, practices a form of meditation called 'Transmission Meditation' using an open metal-poled tetrahedron, which according to their beliefs tunes into the cosmic energy of Maitreya and other spiritual masters. + +== Skepticism == +The neurologist and skeptic Terence Hines has written that pyramid power is a pseudoscience and tests have failed to provide any evidence for its claims: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c612aa919 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Pyramid power" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_power" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:40.942009+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Influenced by Erich von Däniken’s claims that Egyptian mummies had been preserved by some process unknown to science, pyramid power became quite a craze in the world of pseudoscience for a brief time in the mid-1970s. The idea was that the pyramidal shape itself was magical and filled with a mysterious energy and power ... Pyramid power claims have actually been tested. Alter (1973) and Simmons (1973) showed that pyramid-shaped containers were no more effective than any other shape at preserving organic matter (flowers or meat) placed in them. Nor did putting dull razor blades in a pyramid-shaped holder restore them to sharpness, contrary to a frequent claim of pyramid power promoters. +In 2005, an episode of MythBusters was aired on the Discovery Channel in which a basic test of pyramid power was performed, using pyramids built to the specifications found in pyramid power claims, reflecting the location of the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza. Several claims were tested, concerning food rotting, a flower rotting and a razor blade going dull. With control protocols in place, there was no significant difference between items in pyramids and items outside. + +== In popular culture == +Patrick Flanagan's book was featured on the cover and in the lyrics of The Alan Parsons Project's 1978 album Pyramid. "Pyramania", a song from the album, mocked the idea of pyramid power. +Martin Gardner spoofed pyramid power in his "Mathematical Games" column in the Scientific American issue of June 1974, featuring his recurring fictional characters Dr. Matrix and Iva Matrix. +Terry Pratchett's satiric fantasy novel Pyramids incorporates elements of the conjecture when an industry develops around pyramids' ability to manipulate time. + +== See also == +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Alter, A. (1973). The Pyramid and Food Dehydration. New Horizons 1: 92–94. +Simmons, D. (1973). Experiments on the Alleged Sharpening of Razor Blades and the Preservation of Flowers by Pyramids. New Horizons 1: 95-101. + +== External links == +Archived March 13, 2012, at the Wayback Machine Pyramid Power: original research that details on origins, makers and backgrounds. +Pyramidiocy – Skeptic's Dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8c0de08be --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Qi" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:42.248946+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the Sinosphere and Chinese philosophy, qi ( CHEE; simplified Chinese: 气; traditional Chinese: 氣; pinyin: qì) is a vital force traditionally believed to be a part of all living entities. Literally meaning 'vapor', 'air', 'gas', or 'breath', the word qi is polysemous, often translated as 'vital energy', 'vital force', 'material energy', or simply 'energy'. Qi is also a concept in traditional Chinese medicine and in Chinese martial arts. The attempt to cultivate and balance qi is called qigong. +Believers in qi describe it as a vital force, with one's good health requiring its flow to be unimpeded. Originally prescientific, today it is a pseudoscientific concept, i.e. not corresponding to the concept of energy as used in the physical sciences. +Chinese gods and immortals, especially anthropomorphic gods, are sometimes thought to have qi and be a reflection of the microcosm of qi in humans, both having qi that can concentrate in certain body parts. + +== Linguistic aspects == + +The cultural keyword qì is analyzable in terms of Chinese and Sino-Xenic pronunciations. It is represented by the logographs 氣, 气, and 気 with various meanings ranging from "vapor" to "anger", and is the source of the English loanword qi or ch'i. + +=== Pronunciation and etymology === +The logograph 氣 is read with two Chinese pronunciations: the usual qì 氣 "air; vital energy" and the rare archaic xì 氣 "to present food" (later disambiguated with 餼). Hackett Publishing Company, Philip J. Ivanhoe, and Bryan W. Van Norden theorize that the word qi possibly came from a term that referred to "the mist that arose from heated sacrificial offerings". +Pronunciations of 氣 in modern varieties of Chinese with standardized IPA equivalents include: Standard Chinese qì /t͡ɕʰi˥˩/, Wu Chinese qi /t͡ɕʰi˧˦/, Southern Min khì /kʰi˨˩/, Eastern Min ké /kʰɛi˨˩˧/, Standard Cantonese hei3 /hei̯˧/, and Hakka Chinese hi /hi˥/. +Pronunciations of 氣 in Sino-Xenic borrowings include: Japanese ki, Korean gi, and Vietnamese khí. +Reconstructions of the Middle Chinese pronunciation of 氣 standardized to IPA transcription include: /kʰe̯iH/ (Bernard Karlgren), /kʰĭəiH/ (Wang Li), /kʰiəiH/ (Li Rong), /kʰɨjH/ (Edwin Pulleyblank), and /kʰɨiH/ (Zhengzhang Shangfang). +Axel Schuessler's reconstruction of the Later Han Chinese pronunciation of 氣 is /kɨs/. +Reconstructions of the Old Chinese pronunciation of 氣 standardized to IPA transcription include: */kʰɯds/ (Zhengzhang Shangfang), */C.qʰəp-s/ (William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart), and */kə(t)s/ (Axel Schuessler). +The etymology of qì interconnects with Kharia kʰis "anger", Sora kissa "move with great effort", Khmer kʰɛs "strive after; endeavor", and Gyalrongic kʰɐs "anger". + +=== Characters === +In the East Asian languages, qì has three logographs: + +氣 is the traditional Chinese character, Korean hanja, and Japanese kyūjitai ("old character form") kanji +気 is the Japanese shinjitai ("new character form") kanji +气 is the simplified Chinese character. +In addition, qì 炁 is an uncommon character especially used in writing Daoist talismans. Historically, the word qì was generally written as 气 until the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), when it was replaced by the 氣 graph clarified with mǐ 米 "rice" indicating "steam (rising from rice as it cooks.)" and depicting the Traditional Chinese view of the transformative, changeable nature of existence and the universe. +This primary logograph 气, the earliest written character for qì, consisted of three wavy horizontal lines seen in Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) oracle bone script, Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) bronzeware script and large seal script, and Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) small seal script. These oracle, bronze, and seal scripts logographs 气 were used in ancient times as a phonetic loan character to write qǐ 乞 "plead for; beg; ask" which did not have an early character. +The vast majority of Chinese characters are classified as radical-phonetic characters. Such characters combine a semantically suggestive "radical characters" with a phonetic element approximating ancient pronunciation. For example, the widely known word dào 道 "the Dao; the way" graphically combines the "walk" radical 辶 with a shǒu 首 "head" phonetic. Although the modern dào and shǒu pronunciations are dissimilar, the Old Chinese *lˤuʔ-s 道 and *l̥uʔ-s 首 were alike. The regular script character qì 氣 is unusual because qì 气 is both the "air radical" and the phonetic, with mǐ 米 "rice" semantically indicating "steam; vapor". +This qì 气 "air/gas radical" was only used in a few native Chinese characters like yīnyūn 氤氲 "thick mist/smoke", but was also used to create new scientific characters for gaseous chemical elements. Some examples are based on pronunciations in European languages: fú 氟 (with a fú 弗 phonetic) "fluorine" and nǎi 氖 (with a nǎi 乃 phonetic) "neon". Others are based on semantics: qīng 氫 (with a jīng 巠 phonetic, abbreviating qīng 輕 "light-weight") "hydrogen (the lightest element)" and lǜ 氯 (with a lù 彔 phonetic, abbreviating lǜ 綠 "green") "(greenish-yellow) chlorine". +Qì 氣 is the phonetic element in a few characters such as kài 愾 "hate" with the "heart-mind radical" 忄or 心, xì 熂 "set fire to weeds" with the "fire radical" 火, and xì 餼 "to present food" with the "food radical" 食. +The first Chinese dictionary of characters, the Shuowen Jiezi(121 CE) notes that the primary qì 气 is a pictographic character depicting 雲气 "cloudy vapors", and that the full 氣 combines 米 "rice" with the phonetic qi 气, meaning 饋客芻米 "present provisions to guests" (later disambiguated as xì 餼). \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2fff73806 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Qi" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:42.248946+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Meanings === +Qi is a polysemous word. The unabridged Chinese-Chinese character dictionary Hanyu Da Cidian defines it as "present food or provisions" for the xì pronunciation but also lists 23 meanings for the qì pronunciation. The modern ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, which enters xì 餼 "grain; animal feed; make a present of food", and a qì 氣 entry with seven translation equivalents for the noun, two for bound morphemes, and three equivalents for the verb. n. ① air; gas ② smell ③ spirit; vigor; morale ④ vital/material energy (in Ch[inese] metaphysics) ⑤ tone; atmosphere; attitude ⑥ anger ⑦ breath; respiration b.f. ① weather 天氣 tiānqì ② [linguistics] aspiration 送氣 sòngqì v. ① anger ② get angry ③ bully; insult.Qi was also thought of as meaning "'forces in nature'" that deity could control and magicians and occultists could harness. + +=== English borrowing === +Qi was an early Chinese loanword in English. It was romanized as k'i in Church Romanization in the early-19th century, as ch'i in Wade–Giles in the mid-19th century (sometimes misspelled chi omitting the apostrophe), and as qi in Pinyin in the mid-20th century. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for qi gives the pronunciation as , the etymology from Chinese qì "air; breath", and a definition of "The physical life-force postulated by certain Chinese philosophers; the material principle." It also gives eight usage examples, with the first recorded example of k'í in 1850 (The Chinese Repository), of ch'i in 1917 (The Encyclopaedia Sinica), and qi in 1971 (Felix Mann's Acupuncture) +The word qi is very frequently used in word games—such as Scrabble—due to containing a letter Q without a letter U. + +== Concept == + +References to concepts analogous to qi are found in many Asian belief systems. Philosophical conceptions of qi from the earliest records of Chinese philosophy (5th century BCE) correspond to Western notions of humours and to the ancient Hindu yogic concept of prana. An early form of qi comes from the writings of the Chinese philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE). + +Within the framework of Chinese thought, no notion may attain such a degree of abstraction from empirical data as to correspond perfectly to one of our modern universal concepts. Nevertheless, the term qi comes as close as possible to constituting a generic designation equivalent to our word "energy". When Chinese thinkers are unwilling or unable to fix the quality of an energetic phenomenon, the character qi (氣) inevitably flows from their brushes. +The ancient Chinese described qi as "life force". They believed it permeated everything and linked their surroundings together. Qi was also linked to the flow of energy around and through the body, forming a cohesive functioning unit. By understanding the rhythm and flow of qi, they believed they could guide exercises and treatments to provide stability and longevity. +Although the concept has been important within many Chinese philosophies, over the centuries the descriptions of qi have varied and have sometimes been in conflict. Until China came into contact with Western scientific and philosophical ideas, the Chinese had not categorized all things in terms of matter and energy. Qi and li (理: "pattern") were 'fundamental' categories similar to matter and energy. +"In later Chinese philosophy, qi was thought of as the fundamental 'stuff' out of which everything in the universe condenses and into which it eventually dissipates." +Fairly early on, some Chinese thinkers began to believe that there were different fractions of qi—the coarsest and heaviest fractions formed solids, lighter fractions formed liquids, and the most ethereal fractions were the "lifebreath" that animated living beings. Yuanqi is a notion of innate or prenatal qi which is distinguished from acquired qi that a person may develop over their lifetime. + +== Philosophical roots == + +The earliest texts that speak of qi give some indications of how the concept developed. In the Analects of Confucius, qi could mean "breath". Combining it with the Chinese word for blood (making 血氣, xue–qi, blood and breath), the concept could be used to account for motivational characteristics: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..436436dfe --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Qi" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:42.248946+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The [morally] noble man guards himself against three things. When he is young, his xue–qi has not yet stabilized, so he guards himself against sexual passion. When he reaches his prime, his xue–qi is not easily subdued, so he guards himself against combativeness. When he reaches old age, his xue–qi is already depleted, so he guards himself against acquisitiveness. +The philosopher Mozi used the word qi to refer to noxious vapors that would eventually arise from a corpse were it not buried at a sufficient depth. He reported that early civilized humans learned how to live in houses to protect their qi from the moisture that troubled them when they lived in caves. He also associated maintaining one's qi with providing oneself with adequate nutrition. In regard to another kind of qi, he recorded how some people performed a kind of prognostication by observing qi (clouds) in the sky. +Mencius described a kind of qi that might be characterized as an individual's vital energies. This qi was necessary to activity and it could be controlled by a well-integrated willpower. When properly nurtured, this qi was said to be capable of extending beyond the human body to reach throughout the universe. It could also be augmented by means of careful exercise of one's moral capacities. On the other hand, the qi of an individual could be degraded by adverse external forces that succeed in operating on that individual. +Living things were not the only things believed to have qi. Zhuangzi indicated that wind is the qi of the Earth. Moreover, cosmic yin and yang "are the greatest of qi". He described qi as "issuing forth" and creating profound effects. He also said "Human beings are born [because of] the accumulation of qi. When it accumulates there is life. When it dissipates there is death... There is one qi that connects and pervades everything in the world." +The Guanzi essay Neiye (Inward Training) is the oldest received writing on the subject of the cultivation of vapor [qi] and meditation techniques. The essay was probably composed at the Jixia Academy in Qi in the late fourth century B.C. +Xun Zi, another Confucian scholar of the Jixia Academy, followed in later years. At 9:69/127, Xun Zi says, "Fire and water have qi but do not have life. Grasses and trees have life but do not have perceptivity. Fowl and beasts have perceptivity but do not have yi (sense of right and wrong, duty, justice). Men have qi, life, perceptivity, and yi." Chinese people at such an early time had no concept of radiant energy, but they were aware that one can be heated by a campfire from a distance away from the fire. They accounted for this phenomenon by claiming "qi" radiated from fire. At 18:62/122, he also uses "qi" to refer to the vital forces of the body that decline with advanced age. +Among the animals, the gibbon and the crane were considered experts at inhaling the qi. The Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (ca. 150 BC) wrote in Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals: "The gibbon resembles a macaque, but he is larger, and his color is black. His forearms being long, he lives eight hundred years, because he is expert in controlling his breathing." ("猿似猴。大而黑。長前臂。所以壽八百。好引氣也。") +Later, the syncretic text assembled under the direction of Liu An, the Huai Nan Zi, or "Masters of Huainan", has a passage that presages most of what is given greater detail by the Neo-Confucians: + +Heaven (seen here as the ultimate source of all being) falls (duo 墮, i.e., descends into proto-immanence) as the formless. Fleeting, fluttering, penetrating, amorphous it is, and so it is called the Supreme Luminary. The dao begins in the Void Brightening. The Void Brightening produces the universe (yu–zhou). The universe produces qi. Qi has bounds. The clear, yang [qi] was ethereal and so formed heaven. The heavy, turbid [qi] was congealed and impeded and so formed earth. The conjunction of the clear, yang [qi] was fluid and easy. The conjunction of the heavy, turbid [qi] was strained and difficult. So heaven was formed first and earth was made fast later. The pervading essence (xi–jing) of heaven and earth becomes yin and yang. The concentrated (zhuan) essences of yin and yang become the four seasons. The dispersed (san) essences of the four seasons become the myriad creatures. The hot qi of yang in accumulating produces fire. The essence (jing) of the fire-qi becomes the sun. The cold qi of yin in accumulating produces water. The essence of the water-qi becomes the moon. The essences produced by coitus (yin) of the sun and moon become the stars and celestial markpoints (chen, planets).Qi is linked to East Asian thought on magic, and certain body parts were important to magic traditions such as some Taoist sects. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..239477219 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Qi" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:42.248946+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Role in traditional Chinese medicine == +The Huangdi Neijing ("The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Medicine", circa 2nd century BCE) is historically credited with first establishing the pathways, called meridians, through which qi allegedly circulates in the human body. +In traditional Chinese medicine, symptoms of various illnesses are believed to be either the product of disrupted, blocked, and unbalanced qi movement through meridians or deficiencies and imbalances of qi in the Zang Fu organs. Traditional Chinese medicine often seeks to relieve these imbalances by adjusting the circulation of qi using a variety of techniques including herbology, food therapy, physical training regimens (qigong, tai chi, and other martial arts training), moxibustion, tui na, or acupuncture.The cultivation of Heavenly and Earthly qi allow for the maintenance of psychological actions +The nomenclature of Qi in the human body is different depending on its sources, roles, and locations. For sources there is a difference between so-called "Primordial Qi" (acquired at birth from one's parents) and Qi acquired throughout one's life. Or again Chinese medicine differentiates between Qi acquired from the air we breathe (so called "Clean Air") and Qi acquired from food and drinks (so-called "Grain Qi"). Looking at roles Qi is divided into "Defensive Qi" and "Nutritive Qi". Defensive Qi's role is to defend the body against invasions while Nutritive Qi's role is to provide sustenance for the body. To protect against said invasions, medicines have four types of qi; cold, hot, warm, and cool. Cold qi medicines are used to treat invasions hot in nature, while hot qi medicines are used to treat invasions cold in nature. looking at locations, Qi is also named after the Zang-Fu organ or the Meridian in which it resides: "Liver Qi", "Spleen Qi", etc. Lastly, prolonged exposure to the three evil qi (wind, cold, and wetness) can result in the penetration of evil qi through surface body parts, eventually reaching Zang-Fu organs. +A qi field (chu-chong) refers to the cultivation of an energy field by a group, typically for healing or other benevolent purposes. A qi field is believed to be produced by visualization and affirmation. They are an important component of Wisdom Healing Qigong (Zhineng Qigong), founded by Grandmaster Ming Pang. + +== Scientific view == +The existence of Qi has not been proven scientifically. A 1998 consensus statement on acupuncture by the United States National Institutes of Health noted that concepts such as qi "are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information". + +== Practices involving qi == + +=== Feng shui === + +The traditional Chinese art of geomancy, the placement and arrangement of space called feng shui, is based on calculating the balance of qi, interactions between the five elements, yin and yang, and other factors. The retention or dissipation of qi is believed to affect the health, wealth, energy level, luck, and many other aspects of the occupants. Attributes of each item in a space affect the flow of qi by slowing it down, redirecting it or accelerating it. This is said to influence the energy level of the occupants. Positive qi flows in curved lines, whereas negative qi travels in straight lines. In order for qi to be nourishing and positive, it must continue to flow not too quickly or too slowly. In addition, qi should not be blocked abruptly, because it would become stagnant and turn destructive. +One use for a luopan is to detect the flow of qi. The quality of qi may rise and fall over time. Feng shui with a compass might be considered a form of divination that assesses the quality of the local environment. +There are three kinds of qi, known as heaven qi (tian qi 天气), Earth qi (di qi 地气), and human qi (ren qi 人气). Heaven qi is composed of natural forces including the sun and rain. Earth qi is affected by heaven qi. For example, too much sun would lead to drought, and a lack of sun would cause plants to die off. Human qi is affected by earth qi, because the environment has effects on human beings. Feng shui is the balancing of heaven, Earth, and human qi. + +=== Reiki === + +Reiki is a form of alternative medicine called energy healing. Reiki practitioners use a technique called palm healing or hands-on healing through which a "universal energy" is said to be transferred through the palms of the practitioner to the patient in order to encourage emotional or physical healing. Reiki is a pseudoscience, and is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles. It is based on qi ("chi"), which practitioners say is a universal life force, although there is no empirical evidence that such a life force exists. Clinical research has not shown reiki to be effective as a treatment for any medical condition. There has been no proof of the effectiveness of reiki therapy compared to the placebo effect. An overview of reiki investigations found that studies reporting positive effects had methodological flaws. The American Cancer Society stated that reiki should not replace conventional cancer treatment, a sentiment echoed by Cancer Research UK and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Developed in Japan in 1922 by Mikao Usui, it has been adapted into varying cultural traditions across the world. +According to its believers, Reiki healing occurs by laying hands over or on an individual's area of pain and controlling the universal Qi flow of the nearby space, sending into the area of malaise and purifying it. There is no regulation of the practicing of Reiki in the United States and generally no central world organization that has authority over it. + +=== Qigong === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..77ebff3e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +title: "Qi" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:42.248946+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Qìgōng (气功 or 氣功) involves coordinated breathing, movement, and awareness. It is traditionally viewed as a practice to cultivate and balance qi. With roots in traditional Chinese medicine, philosophy and martial arts, qigong is now practiced worldwide for exercise, healing, meditation, and training for martial arts. Typically a qigong practice involves rhythmic breathing, slow and stylized movement, practicing mindfulness, and visualization of guiding qi. + +=== Martial arts === + +Qi is a didactic concept in Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese martial arts. Martial qigong is a feature of both internal and external training systems in China and other East Asian cultures. The most notable of the qi-focused "internal" force (jin) martial arts are Baguazhang, Xingyiquan, tai chi, Southern Praying Mantis, Snake Kung Fu, Southern Dragon Kung Fu, Aikido, Kendo, Hapkido, Aikijujutsu, Luohanquan, and Liuhebafa. +Demonstrations of qi or ki are popular in some martial arts and may include the unraisable body, the unbendable arm, and other feats of power. These feats can be explained using biomechanics and physics. + +=== Acupuncture and moxibustion === + +Acupuncture is a part of traditional Chinese medicine that involves insertion of needles or the application of pinching/gripping into/onto superficial structures of the body (skin, subcutaneous tissue, muscles) at acupuncture points to balance the flow of qi. This is often accompanied by moxibustion, a treatment that involves burning mugwort on or near the skin at an acupuncture point. + +=== Taoist sexual practices === + +== See also == + +== Notes == + +== References == + +=== Works cited === +Barrett, Timothy (1991). "Daoism". In Hook, Brian; Twitchett, Denis (eds.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China (2d ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 296–300. ISBN 052135594X. +Cheng, Chung-ying (2003). "Qi (Ch'i): Vital Force". In Cua, Antonio S. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 615–617. ISBN 978-1-1353-6748-0. +Liu, Xiaogan (2015). Liu, Xiaogan (ed.). Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy. Vol. 6. Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-2927-0. ISBN 978-90-481-2926-3. +Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R.; Sivin, Nathan (2002). The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09297-0. +Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R.; Zhao, Jingyi Jenny; Dong, Qiaosheng (2018). Ancient Greece and China Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316091609. ISBN 978-1-107-08666-1. +Perkins, Dorothy (2013). Encyclopedia of China: The Essential Reference to China, Its History and Culture. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-110-7. +Wang, Yueqing; Bao, Qinggang; Guan, Guoxing (2020). "Vital Energy (Qi, 气)". History of Chinese Philosophy Through Its Key Terms. Translated by Xiang, Shuchen. Singapore: Springer/Nanjing University Press. pp. 177–190. doi:10.1007/978-981-15-2572-8_14. ISBN 978-981-15-2571-1. S2CID 216180284. + +== Further reading == +Wright, Thomas; Eisenberg, David (1995). Encounters with Qi: Exploring Chinese medicine. New York: Norton hi. ISBN 978-0-393-31213-3. OCLC 32998368. +Powers, John. (1995). Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications. p. 591. ISBN 978-1-55939-282-2. + +== External links == + +Article by Fuoco B. Fann "A Philosophical and Cultural Interpretation of Qi" +The Skeptics Dictionary +Qi Encyclopedia \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2f044a256 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +--- +title: "Quantum cognition" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:23.396116+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Quantum cognition uses the mathematical formalism of quantum probability theory to model psychology phenomena when classical probability theory fails. The field focuses on modeling phenomena in cognitive science that have resisted traditional techniques or where traditional models seem to have reached a barrier (e.g., human memory), and modeling preferences in decision theory that seem paradoxical from a traditional rational point of view (e.g., preference reversals). Since the use of a quantum-theoretic framework is for modeling purposes, the identification of quantum structures in cognitive phenomena does not presuppose the existence of microscopic quantum processes in the human brain. +Quantum cognition can be applied to model cognitive phenomena such as information processing by the human brain, language, decision making, human memory, concepts and conceptual reasoning, human judgment, and perception. + +== Challenges for classical probability theory == +Classical probability theory is a rational approach to inference which does not easily explain some observations of human inference in psychology. +Some cases where quantum probability theory has advantages include the conjunction fallacy, the disjunction fallacy, the failures of the sure-thing principle, and question-order bias in judgement. + +=== Conjunction fallacy === +If participants in a psychology experiment are told about "Linda", described as looking like a feminist but not like a bank teller, then asked to rank the probability, + + + + P + + + {\displaystyle P} + + that Linda is feminist, a bank teller or a feminist and a bank teller, they respond with values that indicate: + + + + + P + ( + + feminist + + ) + > + P + ( + + feminist + + + & + + + bank teller + + ) + > + P + ( + + bank teller + + ) + + + {\displaystyle P({\text{feminist}})>P({\text{feminist}}\ \&\ {\text{bank teller}})>P({\text{bank teller}})} + + +Rational classical probability theory makes the incorrect prediction: it expects humans to rank the conjunction less probable than the bank teller option. Many variations of this experiment demonstrate that the fallacy represents human cognition in this case and not an artifact of one presentation. +Quantum cognition models this probability-estimation scenario with quantum probability theory which always ranks sequential probability, + + + + P + ( + + feminist + + + & + + + bank teller + + ) + + + {\displaystyle P({\text{feminist}}\ \&\ {\text{bank teller}})} + +, greater than the direct probability, + + + + P + ( + + bank teller + + ) + + + {\displaystyle P({\text{bank teller}})} + +. The idea is that a person's understanding of "bank teller" is affected by the context of the question involving "feminist". The two questions are "incompatible": to treat them with classical theory would require separate reasoning steps. + +== Main subjects of research == + +=== Quantum-like models of information processing === +The quantum cognition concept is based on the observation that various cognitive phenomena are more adequately described by quantum probability theory than by the classical probability theory (see examples below). Thus, the quantum formalism is considered an operational formalism that describes non-classical processing of probabilistic data. +Here, contextuality is the key word (see the monograph of Khrennikov for detailed representation of this viewpoint). Quantum mechanics is fundamentally contextual. Quantum systems do not have objective properties which can be defined independently of measurement context. As has been pointed out by Niels Bohr, the whole experimental arrangement must be taken into account. Contextuality implies existence of incompatible mental variables, violation of the classical law of total probability, and constructive or destructive interference effects. Thus, the quantum cognition approach can be considered an attempt to formalize contextuality of mental processes, by using the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. + +=== Decision making === +Suppose a person is given an opportunity to play two rounds of the following gamble: a coin toss will determine whether the subject wins $200 or loses $100. Suppose the subject has decided to play the first round, and does so. Some subjects are then given the result (win or lose) of the first round, while other subjects are not yet given any information about the results. The experimenter then asks whether the subject wishes to play the second round. Performing this experiment with real subjects gives the following results: + +When subjects believe they won the first round, the majority of subjects choose to play again on the second round. +When subjects believe they lost the first round, the majority of subjects choose to play again on the second round. +Given these two separate choices, according to the sure thing principle of rational decision theory, they should also play the second round even if they don't know or think about the outcome of the first round. +But, experimentally, when subjects are not told the results of the first round, the majority of them decline to play a second round. +This finding violates the law of total probability, yet it can be explained as a quantum interference effect in a manner similar to the explanation for the results from double-slit experiment in quantum physics. Similar violations of the sure-thing principle are seen in empirical studies of the Prisoner's Dilemma and have likewise been modeled in terms of quantum interference. +The above deviations from classical rational expectations in agents’ decisions under uncertainty produce well known paradoxes in behavioral economics, that is, the Allais, Ellsberg and Machina paradoxes. These deviations can be explained if one assumes that the overall conceptual landscape influences the subject's choice in a neither predictable nor controllable way. A decision process is thus an intrinsically contextual process, hence it cannot be modeled in a single Kolmogorovian probability space, which justifies the employment of quantum probability models in decision theory. More explicitly, the paradoxical situations above can be represented in a unified Hilbert space formalism where human behavior under uncertainty is explained in terms of genuine quantum aspects, namely, superposition, interference, contextuality and incompatibility. +Considering automated decision making, quantum decision trees have different structure compared to classical decision trees. Data can be analyzed to see if a quantum decision tree model fits the data better. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..68655635f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "Quantum cognition" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:23.396116+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Human probability judgments === +Quantum probability provides a new way to explain human probability judgment errors including the conjunction and disjunction errors. A conjunction error occurs when a person judges the probability of a likely event L and an unlikely event U to be greater than the unlikely event U; a disjunction error occurs when a person judges the probability of a likely event L to be greater than the probability of the likely event L or an unlikely event U. Quantum probability theory is a generalization of Bayesian probability theory because it is based on a set of von Neumann axioms that relax some of the classic Kolmogorov axioms. The quantum model introduces a new fundamental concept to cognition—the compatibility versus incompatibility of questions and the effect this can have on the sequential order of judgments. Quantum probability provides a simple account of conjunction and disjunction errors as well as many other findings such as order effects on probability judgments. +The liar paradox - The contextual influence of a human subject on the truth behavior of a cognitive entity is explicitly exhibited by the so-called liar paradox, that is, the truth value of a sentence like "this sentence is false". One can show that the true-false state of this paradox is represented in a complex Hilbert space, while the typical oscillations between true and false are dynamically described by the Schrödinger equation. + +=== Knowledge representation === +Concepts are basic cognitive phenomena, which provide the content for inference, explanation, and language understanding. Cognitive psychology has researched different approaches for understanding concepts including exemplars, prototypes, and neural networks, and different fundamental problems have been identified, such as the experimentally tested non classical behavior for the conjunction and disjunction of concepts, more specifically the Pet-Fish problem or guppy effect, and the overextension and underextension of typicality and membership weight for conjunction and disjunction. By and large, quantum cognition has drawn on quantum theory in three ways to model concepts. + +Exploit the contextuality of quantum theory to account for the contextuality of concepts in cognition and language and the phenomenon of emergent properties when concepts combine +Use quantum entanglement to model the semantics of concept combinations in a non-decompositional way, and to account for the emergent properties/associates/inferences in relation to concept combinations +Use quantum superposition to account for the emergence of a new concept when concepts are combined, and as a consequence put forward an explanatory model for the Pet-Fish problem situation, and the overextension and underextension of membership weights for the conjunction and disjunction of concepts. +The large amount of data collected by Hampton on the combination of two concepts can be modeled in a specific quantum-theoretic framework in Fock space where the observed deviations from classical set (fuzzy set) theory, the above-mentioned over- and under- extension of membership weights, are explained in terms of contextual interactions, superposition, interference, entanglement and emergence. And, more, a cognitive test on a specific concept combination has been performed which directly reveals, through the violation of Bell's inequalities, quantum entanglement between the component concepts. + +=== Semantic analysis and information retrieval === +The research in (iv) had a deep impact on the understanding and initial development of a formalism to obtain semantic information when dealing with concepts, their combinations and variable contexts in a corpus of unstructured documents. This conundrum of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) on the web – and data bases in general – can be addressed using the mathematical formalism of quantum theory. As basic steps, (a) K. Van Rijsbergen introduced a quantum structure approach to IR, (b) Widdows and Peters utilised a quantum logical negation for a concrete search system, and Aerts and Czachor identified quantum structure in semantic space theories, such as latent semantic analysis. Since then, the employment of techniques and procedures induced from the mathematical formalisms of quantum theory – Hilbert space, quantum logic and probability, non-commutative algebras, etc. – in fields such as IR and NLP, has produced significant results. + +== History == +Ideas for applying the formalisms of quantum theory to cognition first appeared in the 1990s by Diederik Aerts and his collaborators Jan Broekaert, Sonja Smets and Liane Gabora, by Harald Atmanspacher, Robert Bordley, and Andrei Khrennikov. A special issue on Quantum Cognition and Decision appeared in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology (2009, vol 53.), which planted a flag for the field. A few books related to quantum cognition have been published including those by Khrennikov (2004, 2010), Ivancivic and Ivancivic (2010), Busemeyer and Bruza (2012), E. Conte (2012). The first Quantum Interaction workshop was held at Stanford in 2007 organized by Peter Bruza, William Lawless, C. J. van Rijsbergen, and Don Sofge as part of the 2007 AAAI Spring Symposium Series. This was followed by workshops at Oxford in 2008, Saarbrücken in 2009, at the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium Series held in Washington, D.C., 2011 in Aberdeen, 2012 in Paris, and 2013 in Leicester. Tutorials also were presented annually beginning in 2007 until 2013 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. A Special Issue on Quantum models of Cognition appeared in 2013 in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Busemeyer, J. R.; Bruza, P. D. (2012). Quantum models of cognition and decision. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-01199-1. +Busemeyer, J. R.; Wang, Z. (2019). "Primer on quantum cognition". Spanish Journal of Psychology. 22. e53. doi:10.1017/sjp.2019.51. PMID 31868156. S2CID 209446824. +Conte, E. (2012). Advances in application of quantum mechanics in neuroscience and psychology: a Clifford algebraic approach. Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 978-1-61470-325-9. +Ivancevic, V.; Ivancevic, T. (2010). Quantum Neural Computation. Springer. ISBN 978-90-481-3349-9. +Khrennikov, A. (2006). "Quantum-like brain: 'Interference of minds'". Biosystems. 84 (3): 225–241. arXiv:quant-ph/0205092. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2005.11.005. PMID 16427733. +Khrennikov, A. (2004). Information Dynamics in Cognitive, Psychological, Social, and Anomalous Phenomena. Fundamental Theories of Physics. Vol. 138. Kluwer. ISBN 1-4020-1868-1. +Atmanspacher, H.; Römer, H.; Walach, H. (2002). "Weak quantum theory: Complementarity and entanglement in physics and beyond". Foundations of Physics. 32 (3): 379–406. arXiv:quant-ph/0104109. Bibcode:2002FoPh...32..379A. doi:10.1023/A:1014809312397. S2CID 118583726. + +== External links == +Busemeyer, J. R (2011). "Quantum Cognition and Decision Notes". Indiana University. Archived from the original on October 29, 2011. Life is complex, it has both real and imaginary parts +Blutner, Reinhard. "Quantum Cognition". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_healing-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_healing-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..28c750cf4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_healing-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Quantum healing" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_healing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:43.410328+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Quantum healing is a pseudoscientific mixture of ideas purportedly drawn from quantum mechanics, psychology, philosophy, and neurophysiology. Advocates of quantum healing assert that quantum phenomena govern health and wellbeing. There are different versions, which allude to various quantum ideas including wave particle duality and virtual particles, and more generally to "energy" and to vibrations. Quantum healing is a form of alternative medicine. + + +== History == +Deepak Chopra coined the term "quantum healing" when he published the first edition of his book with that title in 1989. His discussions of quantum healing have been characterised as technobabble - "incoherent babbling strewn with scientific terms" which drives many of those who actually understand physics "crazy" and as "redefining Wrong". +Quantum healing has a number of vocal followers, but the scientific community widely regards it as nonsensical. The main criticism revolves around its systematic misinterpretation of modern physics, especially of the fact that macroscopic objects (such as the human body or individual cells) are much too large to exhibit inherently quantum properties like interference and wave function collapse. +Physicist and science communicator Brian Cox argues that misuse of the word "quantum", such as its use in the phrase quantum healing, has a negative effect on society as it undermines genuine science and discourages people from engaging with conventional medicine. He states that "for some scientists, the unfortunate distortion and misappropriation of scientific ideas that often accompanies their integration into popular culture is an unacceptable price to pay." + + +== See also == +List of esoteric healing articles +Quantum mysticism +Quantum mind + + +== References == + + +== External links == + Media related to Quantum healing at Wikimedia Commons \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-0.md index b7e7dedc7..69bf378ba 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-1.md index c46fdc553..0a36b9011 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-2.md index fb944a7de..70c8e03d9 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-3.md index b122e979e..d1ee8f46b 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-4.md index eb6c62151..584677248 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-4.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-4.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 5/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-5.md index 81bafe8e9..45240d80f 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-5.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind-5.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 6/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:24.314329+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:03.281485+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6b8a15fad --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +title: "Quantum mysticism" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:44.631735+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Quantum mysticism, sometimes referred to pejoratively as quantum quackery or quantum woo, is a set of metaphysical beliefs and associated practices that seek to relate spirituality or mystical worldviews to the ideas of quantum mechanics and its interpretations. Quantum mysticism is considered pseudoscience and quackery by many quantum mechanics experts. +Before the 1970s the term was usually used in reference to the postulate that "consciousness causes collapse" but was later more closely associated with the purportedly pseudoscientific views espoused by New Age thinkers such as Fritjof Capra and other members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, who were influential in popularizing the modern form of quantum mysticism. + + +== History == +Many early quantum physicists held some interest in traditionally Eastern metaphysics. Physicists Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, two of the main pioneers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, were interested in Eastern mysticism, but are not known to have directly associated one with the other. In fact, both endorsed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. +The historian of religion Olav Hammer said that "Schrödinger’s studies of Hindu mysticism never compelled him to pursue the same course as quantum metaphysicists such as David Bohm or Fritjof Capra." Schrödinger biographer Walter J. Moore said that Schrödinger's two interests of quantum physics and Hindu mysticism were "strangely dissociated". +In his 1961 paper "Remarks on the mind–body question", Eugene Wigner suggested that a conscious observer played a fundamental role in quantum mechanics, a concept which is part of the consciousness causes collapse interpretation. While his paper served as inspiration for later mystical works by others, Wigner's ideas were primarily philosophical and were not considered overtly pseudoscientific like the mysticism that followed. By the late 1970s, Wigner had shifted his position and rejected the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin suggests that "consciousness [was] introduced hypothetically at the birth of quantum physics, [and] the term 'mystical' was also used by its founders, to argue in favor of and against such an introduction." +Mysticism was argued against by Albert Einstein. Einstein's theories have often been falsely believed to support mystical interpretations of quantum theory. Einstein said, with regard to quantum mysticism, "No physicist believes that. Otherwise he wouldn't be a physicist." He debates several arguments about the approval of mysticism, even suggesting Bohr and Pauli to be in support of and to hold a positive belief in mysticism which he believes to be false. +Niels Bohr denied quantum mysticism and had rejected the hypothesis that quantum theory requires a conscious observer as early as 1927, despite having been "sympathetic towards the hypothesis that understanding consciousness might require an extension of quantum theory to accommodate laws other than those of physics". + + +== In New Age thought == +In the early 1970s, New Age culture began to incorporate ideas from quantum physics, beginning with books by Arthur Koestler, Lawrence LeShan and others which suggested that purported parapsychological phenomena could be explained by quantum mechanics. +In this decade, the Fundamental Fysiks Group emerged. This group of physicists embraced quantum mysticism, parapsychology, Transcendental Meditation, and various New Age and Eastern mystical practices. +Inspired in part by Wigner's exploration that consciousness causes collapse, Fritjof Capra, a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, wrote The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975), which espoused New Age quantum physics; the book was popular among the non-scientific public. In 1979, Gary Zukav, a non-scientist and "the most successful of Capra's followers", published The Dancing Wu Li Masters. The Fundamental Fysiks Group and Capra's book are said to be major influences for the rise of quantum mysticism as a pseudoscientific interpretation of quantum mechanics. + + +== Modern usage and examples == +In contrast to the mysticism of the early 20th century, today quantum mysticism typically refers to New Age beliefs that combine ancient mysticism with the language of quantum mechanics. Called a pseudoscience and a "hijacking" of quantum physics, it draws upon "coincidental similarities of language rather than genuine connections" to quantum mechanics. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined the phrase "quantum flapdoodle" to refer to the misuse and misapplication of quantum physics to other topics. +An example of such use is New Age guru Deepak Chopra's "quantum theory" that aging is caused by the mind, expounded in his books Quantum Healing (1989) and Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (1993). In 1998, Chopra was awarded the parody Ig Nobel Prize in the physics category for "his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness". In 2012, Stuart Hameroff and Chopra proposed that the "quantum soul" could exist "apart from the body" and "in space-time geometry, outside the brain, distributed nonlocally". +The 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? dealt with a range of New Age ideas in relation to physics. It was produced by the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, founded by J.Z. Knight, a channeler who said that her teachings were based on a discourse with a 35,000-year-old disembodied entity named Ramtha. Featuring Fundamental Fysiks Group member Fred Alan Wolf, the film misused some aspects of quantum mechanics—including the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the observer effect—as well as biology and medicine. Numerous critics dismissed the film for its use of pseudoscience. + + +== See also == + + +== Notes == + + + +== Further reading == +Publications relating to quantum mysticism +Chopra, Deepak (1989). Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Bantam Books. ISBN 978-0553053685. +LeShan, Lawrence (1974). The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal. Viking Press. ISBN 978-0670465668. +Talbot, Michael (1981). Mysticism And The New Physics. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0710008312. +Talbot, Michael (1986). Beyond The Quantum. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0026162104. +Talbot, Michael (1991). The Holographic Universe. Grafton. ISBN 978-0246136909. +Toben, Bob (1975). Space-Time and Beyond. In conversation with physicists Jack Sarfatti and Fred Alan Wolf. E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-47399-8. +Walker, Evan Harris (2000). The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life. Basic Books. ISBN 0-7382-0436-6. +Wilber, Ken, ed. (1984). Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0394723389. +Criticism of quantum mysticism +Jones, Richard H. (2010). Piercing the veil: comparing science and mysticism as ways of knowing reality. New York: Jackson Square Books. ISBN 978-1-4392-6682-3. OCLC 651026196. – criticism from both scientific and mystical point of view +Scerri, Eric R. (1989). "Eastern mysticism and the alleged parallels with physics". American Journal of Physics. 57 (8). American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT): 687–692. Bibcode:1989AmJPh..57..687S. doi:10.1119/1.15921. ISSN 0002-9505. S2CID 121572969. +Stenger, Victor J. (1995). The unconscious quantum: metaphysics in modern physics and cosmology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-57392-022-3. OCLC 32820493. – an anti-mystical point-of-view + + +== External links == + Media related to Quantum mysticism at Wikimedia Commons \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiesthesia-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiesthesia-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b6545fbb1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiesthesia-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +--- +title: "Radiesthesia" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiesthesia" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:46.936908+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Radiesthesia describes a physical ability to detect radiation emitted by a person, animal, object or geographical feature. One of its practitioners, J. Cecil Maby, defined it as "The faculty and study of certain reflexive physical responses of living tissue to various radiations ... resulting in displacement currents and other inductive effects in living tissues." He distinguished it critically from the psychic facility of divination. Despite this distinction, there is no scientific evidence for the existence of the phenomenon and it is classed by the mainstream as pseudoscience. + + +== Definitions == +One definition is "sensitivity to radiations of all kinds emanating from living beings, inanimate objects, mineral ores, water and even photographs". +The word derives from Latin root radi- referring to beams of light, radiation and aesthesia, referring to sensory perception. +The term is a neologism created by a French Catholic priest Alexis Timothée Bouly who was a celebrated dowsing practitioner in the early part of the 20th century. Bouly claimed to be able to detect unexploded ordnance from WW1 and also to detect molecular changes in laboratory experiments. He was the founder at Lille in 1929 of the Association of the Friends of Radiesthesia (Association des Amis de la Radiesthésie). + + +== Claims == +Practitioners may claim to be able to detect the emitted radiation through use of their hands or more typically with dowsing rods or a pendulum. +Teleradiesthesia or tele-radiesthesia describes this sensitivity to radiation but without the need to be in physical proximity to the subject. Typically a practitioner will use an instrument such as a pendulum to perform analysis based on a map or photograph. +The practical application of radiesthesia, i.e. dowsing, is directed toward providing individual and environmental benefits, such as: + +diagnosis of infirmities +detection of underground water +detection of underground mineral sources +detection of the Earth's telluric currents and magnetic fields +location of lost objects +location of missing persons or livestock +A distinction may be made in the application of radiesthesic techniques in the detection of physical phenomena e.g. water, minerals, objects, changed cell condition and using these techniques for analysis of supposed subtle energy fields or the 'aura' of an individual. +Researchers have cited an involuntary bodily reaction, that is, ideomotor phenomenon, as the initiator of the movement seen occurring in instruments such as dowsing rods or a pendulum. It is this reactive movement which typically acts as the indicator of the location or the state change of the subject or object under investigation. + + +== See also == +Dowsing – Pseudoscientific attempts to locate underground objects +Geobiology (pseudoscience) – Pseudoscientific study of the Earth's natural radiation on human, animal and plant biology +Radionics – Form of alternative medicine +Rhabdomancy – Divination technique + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +F.A. Archdale Elementary Radiesthesia and the Use of the Pendulum, 1950 +Marc Aurice, Le Grand Livre de la radiesthésie, 2008 éditions Trédaniel ISBN 978-28-5707-944-6 +Gabriell Blackburn, Science and Art of the Pendulum: A Complete Course in Radiesthesia, 1984 pub. Idylwild ISBN 978-09-6130-541-3 +C.L. Cooper-Hunt, Radiesthetic Analysis, 1996 pub. Health Research Books ISBN 978-18-5228-306-3 +Bruce Copen, Dowsing from Maps, Tele-radiesthesia, 1975 pub. Academic Publications +Emma Decourtay, Initiation à la radiesthésie, 2004 éditions Cristal ISBN 978-28-4895-020-4 +Gilbert Degueldre, La Radiesthésie, cet instinct originel, 1985 éditions Florikosse asbl, Verviers – Belgique +Karl Maximilan Fischer, Radiästhesie und Geopathie – Theorie und empirische Untersuchungen, 1989 Böhlau in Wien ISBN 978-32-0505-097-1 +Christopher Freeland, Radiesthesia I – Method and Training for the Modern Dowser, 2020 pub. Completelynovel ISBN 978-17-8723-395-9 +Tom Graves, Pendel und Wünschelrute, Radiästhesie, 1999 ISBN 978-34-4211-732-1 +Jane E. Hartman, Radionics and Radiesthesia, 1999 pub Aquarian Systems ISBN 978-09-6180-452-7 +Ray Hyman. How People Are Fooled by Ideomotor Action. +Adolphe Landspurg, Comment devenir sourcier et géobiologue (La pratique de la radiesthésie vibratoire), 2003 éditions Dangles ISBN 2-7033-0553-2 +Hartmut Lüdeling: Handbuch der Radiaesthesie – Schwerpunkt Grifflängentechnik. 2006 Drachen-Verlag ISBN 978-39-2736-928-3 +Marguerite Maury, How to Dowse – Experimental And Practical Radiesthesia 1953, pub. G. Bell and Sons; 2008 edition ISBN 978-14-4377-286-0 +Alexis Mermet, Principles and Practice of Radiesthesia: A textbook for Practitioners and Students, 1959; 1991 edition ISBN 978-18-5230-007-4 +Michel Moine, La radiestesia – la otra sciencia, 1974 ISBN 978-84-2702-785-5 +Helmut Müller, Radiestesia: Manual Práctico, 1991 Editorial De Vecchi ISBN 978-84-3150-513-4 +Otto Prokop, Wolf Wimmer: Wünschelrute, Erdstrahlen, Radiästhesie. Die okkulten Strahlenfühligkeitslehren im Lichte der Wissenschaft. 1985 Thieme ISBN 978-34-3284-473-2 +Jessie Toler Kingsley Tarpey, Healing by radiesthesia, 1955, pub. Omega Press +Henry Tomlinson, The Divination of Disease: A Study in Radiesthesia, 1953 pub. Health Science Press +S.W. Tromp, Psychical Physics, a Scientific Analysis of Dowsing, Radiesthesia and Kindred Phenomena, 1949 pub. Elzevier, New York +Herbet Weaver, Divining, the Primary Sense: Unfamiliar Radiation in Nature, Art and Science, 1978 pub, Routledge & Kegan Paul ISBN 978-0710087348 +V. D. Wethered, A Radiesthetic Approach to Health and Homoeopathy, or Health and the Pendulum, 1950, pub. British Society of Dowsers +V. D. Wethered, An Introduction to Medical Radiesthesia and Radionics, 1957 pub. C.W. Daniel Company + + +== External links == +Association des Amis de la Radiesthesie (in French) +Associazioni Italiana Radiestesisti (in Italian) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ca1b8bca5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Radionics" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:48.207850+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Radionics—also called electromagnetic therapy (EMT) and the Abrams method—is a form of alternative medicine that claims that disease can be diagnosed and treated by applying electromagnetic radiation (EMR), such as radio waves, to the body from an electrically powered device. It is similar to magnet therapy, which also applies EMR to the body but uses a magnet that generates a static electromagnetic field. +The concept behind radionics originated with two books published by American physician Albert Abrams in 1909 and 1910. Over the next decade, Abrams became a millionaire by leasing EMT machines, which he designed himself. This so-called treatment contradicts the principles of physics and biology and therefore is widely considered pseudoscientific. The United States Food and Drug Administration does not recognize any legitimate medical use for radionic devices. +Several systematic reviews have shown radionics is no more effective than placebo and falls into the category of pseudoscience. + +== History == +Beginning around 1909, Albert Abrams (1864–1924) began to claim that he could detect "energy frequencies" in his patients' bodies. The idea was that a healthy person will have certain energy frequencies moving through their body that define health, while an unhealthy person will exhibit other, different energy frequencies that define disorders. He said he could cure people by "balancing" their discordant frequencies and claimed that his devices are sensitive enough that he could tell someone's religion by looking at a drop of blood. He developed thirteen devices and became a millionaire leasing his devices, and the American Medical Association described him as the "dean of gadget quacks". His devices were definitively proven useless by an independent investigation commissioned by Scientific American in 1924. He used "frequency" not in its standard meaning, but to describe an imputed energy type, which does not correspond to any property of energy in the scientific sense. +In one form of radionics popularised by Abrams, some blood on a bit of filter paper is attached to a device Abrams called a "dynamizer", which is attached by wires to a string of other devices and then to the forehead of a healthy volunteer, facing west in a dim light. By tapping on his abdomen and searching for areas of "dullness", disease in the donor of the blood is diagnosed by proxy. Handwriting analysis is also used to diagnose disease under this scheme. Having done this, the practitioner may use a special device known as an oscilloclast or any of a range of other devices to broadcast vibrations at the patient in order to attempt to heal them. +Other notable quack devices in radionics have included the Ionaco and the Hieronymus machine. +Some people claim to have the paranormal or parapsychological ability to detect "radiation" within the human body, which they call radiesthesia. According to the theory, all human bodies give off unique or characteristic "radiations" as do all other physical bodies or objects. Such radiations are often termed an "aura". Radiesthesia is cited as the explanation of such phenomena as dowsing by rods and pendulums in order to locate buried substances, diagnose illnesses, and the like. Radiesthesia has been described as a mixture of occultism and pseudoscience by critics. +Modern practitioners conceptualize these devices merely as a focusing aid to the practitioner's proclaimed dowsing abilities, and claim that there is no longer any need for the device to have any demonstrable function. Indeed, Abrams's black boxes had no purpose of their own, being merely obfuscated collections of wires and electronic parts. +Contemporary proponents of radionics or EMT claim that where there is an imbalance of electromagnetic fields or frequencies, within the body, that it causes diseases or other illnesses by disrupting the body's chemical makeup. These practitioners believe that applications of electromagnetic energy from outside the body can correct these imbalances. Like magnet therapy, electromagnetic therapy has been proposed by practitioners of alternative medicine for a variety of purposes, including, according to the American Cancer Society, "ulcers, headaches, burns, chronic pain, nerve disorders, spinal cord injuries, diabetes, gum infections, asthma, bronchitis, arthritis, cerebral palsy, heart disease, and cancer". +Another variant of radionics or EMT is magnetic resonance therapy. + +== Scientific assessment == +The claims for radionic devices contradict the accepted principles of biology and physics. No scientifically verifiable mechanisms of function for these devices has been posited, and they are often described as "magical" in operation. No plausible biophysical basis for the "putative energy fields" has been proposed, and neither the fields themselves nor their purported therapeutic effects have been convincingly demonstrated. +No radionic device has been found efficacious in the diagnosis or treatment of any disease, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not recognize any legitimate medical uses of any such device. According to David Helwig in The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, "most physicians dismiss radionics as quackery". +Internally, a radionic device is very simple and may not even form a functional electrical circuit. The wiring in the analysis device is simply used as a mystical conduit. A radionic device does not use or need electric power, though a power cord may be provided, ostensibly to determine a "base rate" on which the device operates to attempt to heal a subject. Typically, little attempt is made to define or describe what, if anything, is flowing along the wires and being measured. Energy in the physical sense, i.e., energy that can be sensed and measured, is viewed as subordinate to intent and "creative action". +Claims about contemporary EMT devices are similar to those made by the older generation of "radionics" devices, are also not supported by evidence, and are also pseudoscientific. Even though some of the early works in bioelectromagnetics have been applied in clinical medicine, the use of electromagnetic energy in mainstream medicine is completely unrelated to alternative devices or methods that use externally applied electrical forces. +The American Cancer Society says that "relying on electromagnetic treatment alone and avoiding conventional medical care may have serious health consequences". In some cases the devices may be ineffective and harmful. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..85c4fd0c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Radionics" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:48.207850+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Reviews === +Several systematic reviews have shown EMT is not a useful therapy: + +In 2009 no significant difference from control was found for management of pain or stiffness for osteoarthritis. +In 2011 a systematic literature review on the use of pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMT) body mats used in a wide range of conditions found insufficient evidence for them to be recommended and recommended further high‐quality, double‐blind trials. +In 2014 insufficient for the efficacy of EMT as a therapy for urinary incontinence. +In 2014 EMT was found to have no difference from control for stimulation of bone growth in acute fractures. +In 2015 Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews found no evidence that EMT was useful in healing pressure ulcers or venous stasis ulcers. +A 2016 guideline, in addition to reviews in 2016, 2013 and 2022, did not find EMT useful for various forms of pain. + +== EMT devices == +The FDA has banned some commercially available EMT devices. In 2008 the VIBE machine from Vibe Technologies had a Class I recall that was completed in 2012. +Other ineffectual EMT therapy devices that have been marketed include: + +"BioResonance Tumor Therapy", developed by Martin Keymer and purported to stimulate the P53 gene to cure cancer. +"Cell Com System", a device created by Hugo Nielsen that is used on hands and feet to regulate communications between cells in the body. +"Rife machine", a device created by Royal Rife, which is also known as frequency therapy or frequency generator and marketed as treating cancer. +"Zapping Machine", a device created by Hulda Regehr Clark, claimed to cure cancer by using low-level electrical current to kill parasites within the body that are supposed to cause cancer. +"EMP Pad", a device manufactured by EMPPad, advertised by Noel Edmonds, that is claimed to slow ageing, reduce pain, lift depression and stress and tackles cancer. +"UVLrx", a device manufactured by UVLrx Therapeutics that provides ultraviolet treatment of blood to treat HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, Dengue fever and Lyme disease, as well as many other conditions. +"ReBuilder", a device manufactured by Rebuilder, is claimed to reverse neuropathy (nerve damage) by using tiny electrical signals to wake up nerves. +"Electro Physiological Feedback Xrroid (EPFX)", a device manufactured by Desiré Dubounet that is claimed to cure cancer, as well as other serious conditions by sending electromagnetic frequencies into the body. + +== Notable practitioners == + +== See also == +Biophoton – a term used by EMT proponents +Electropoise +Neuromodulation +Neurostimulation +Psionics +Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Stephen Barrett, William T. Jarvis. (1993). The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-855-4. +Eric Jameson. (1961). The Natural History of Quackery. Charles C. Thomas Publisher. +Bob McCoy. (2004). Radionics. In Quack!: Tales of Medical Fraud from the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. Santa Monica Press. pp. 71–94. ISBN 1-891661-10-8. +James Harvey Young. (1965). Device Quackery in America. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 39: 154–162. + +== External links == +Regulatory Actions related to EMT Devices – Stephen Barrett M.D. via Quackwatch +Index of EMT Devices – Stephen Barrett M.D. via devicewatch.org +Radionics in the Skeptic's dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralstonism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralstonism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..15b80fd20 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralstonism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Ralstonism" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralstonism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:49.345215+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Ralstonism was a social movement founded by Webster Edgerly that promoted his pseudoscientific ideas of personal and racial hygiene. It began as the Ralston Health Club, which published Edgerly's writings. It was a hierarchical organization where members were ranked according to the number of "degrees" they had, which ranged from 0 to 100. Members gained in the hierarchy by purchasing and studying Ralston's books, each of which taught five degrees. Edgerly at first published his ideas under the pseudonym Everett Ralston, but later used his own name and explained "Ralston" as an acronym for "Regime, Activity, Light, Strength, Temperation, Oxygen, Nature" +Edgerly saw his followers as the founding members of a new race, based on Caucasians, and free from "impurities". He advocated the castration of all "anti-racial" (non-Caucasian) males at birth. +Edgerly wrote 82 of what would today be called self-help books under the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury. They covered subjects including diet, exercise, punctuation, sexual magnetism, artistic deep breathing, facial expressions, and ventriloquism. Although Edgerly publicly claimed that the Ralston Company had no goods for sale, he did sell his books through mail order. +In addition to advice like toothbrushing, the books make various recommendations: for example, every young man should engage in a form of probationary marriage with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Edgerly also created his own language, called the Adam-Man-Tongue, with a 33-letter alphabet. +The Magnetism Club of America, another Ralstonite organization, was founded to give its members mind control. + +Ralstonites were to follow strict dietary guidelines. For example, watermelons were supposed to be poisonous to Caucasians. Correct diet and proper physical exercise would help readers attain personal magnetism, which would give them control over the thoughts of others. Much of the physical regime demanded moving in graceful curves and arcs and walking exclusively on the balls of one's feet. Because sudden starts and stops and sharp angular movements caused a "leakage of vital force", Ralstonites were to even pick marbles in continuous circles. There was a proper way to bathe (dry bath), gesture, sit, stand, sleep, talk, and have sex. +In 1900, Edgerly joined forces with the founder of Purina Food Company, which took the name Ralston Purina Company (which would later become Nestlé Purina PetCare). It made whole wheat cereal that Ralstonites were to consume. The food company Edgerly founded evolved into what is now called Ralcorp which was the original manufacturer of cereal brands including Chex and Cookie Crisp. +Between 1894 and 1895, Edgerly bought large areas of farmland along the northern slope of Hopewell Valley, New Jersey, where he founded Ralston Heights in 1905. A house he designed was built to contain a community of Ralstonites he meant to be a core of a future City of Ralston. The contours of the estate followed Edgerly's conviction that sudden stops and walking in straight lines would cause leakage of vital force. Edgerly planned to expand to hundreds of lots, sixteen small farms, seven palaces and a Temple of Ralston. This community did not materialize, at least not in the form Edgerly intended. Much of the estate still exists, albeit in ruined condition. + + +== References == +Six, Janet (May–June 2004). "Hidden History of Ralston Heights". Archaeology. + + +== External links == +Writings of Webster Edgerly at oddbooks.com +Life building method of the Ralston Health Club; "All nature" course at archive.org +Book of general membership of the Ralston Health Club at archive.org +Magnetism Manual of the Magnetism Club of America (archived) (formerly at neurolinguistic.com) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8419d7597 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: "Rational Culture" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:50.482618+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Rational Culture (In Portuguese: Cultura Racional) is a Brazilian UFO religion derived from Umbanda, founded in 1935 in the city of Rio de Janeiro by the medium Manuel Jacinto Coelho. +Rational Culture is based on a series of books called Universo em Desencanto, a work that addresses a wide range of topics including cosmology, metaphysics, ecology, linguistics, theology, UFOs, and flying saucers. + +== Origins == +Rational Culture emerged on October 4, 1935, at the "Tenda Espírita Francisco de Assis" in Rio de Janeiro, Rua Lopez da Cruz, Méier. +During the early decades of the 20th century, persecution of Afro-Brazilian religions increased, with practitioners of these religious segments being pursued and monitored by the police, especially between 1930 and 1945. To escape this persecution and be accepted by society, especially the urban middle class, some Afro-Brazilian religions underwent a process of "de-Africanization" and whitening, in which they sought to differentiate themselves from the so-called "lower spiritism," viewed by this society as backward and uncultured, while also constructing a "rational legitimacy." For this purpose, a group known as the "Intellectuals of Umbanda" worked intensively to provide Umbanda with a doctrinal basis and written knowledge, thereby distinguishing it from the practices of "lower spiritism." + +== Doctrine == +Rational Culture emphatically presents the idea that its teachings should be found only in its books and that reading them is the path to "salvation," described in its writings as "Rational Immunization," with no need for methods other than sequential reading of the books. + +=== Religiosity === +Similar to how the author of Rational Culture distinguishes between "spiritism," dividing it into true and false, the same is done with the term "religion," differentiating it in his work between: true religion and false religion, or religion from above and religion from below. Also, Rational Culture initially denies its religious nature, claiming to be just transcendental knowledge. + +=== Astral Planes === +According to Rational Culture, the world is divided into four planes: the Rational World, Higher Astral, Lower Astral, and Terrestrial Astral. + +==== Rational World ==== +Inhabited by rational beings who have always existed in a rational state and readers of Universo em Desencanto, invisible and on other planets. Its inhabitants would be composed of Rational Energy, a pure, clean, and perfect energy. Located above the Higher Astral. + +==== Higher Astral ==== +Inhabited by beings who were unable to fully develop their reasoning, who manifest themselves as flying saucers. The Higher Astral plane, located above the Sun, above electric and magnetic energies, is formed by inhabitants generated by "Mediating Energy." + +==== Lower Astral ==== +Inhabited by beings who did not possess "rational conduct." + +==== Terrestrial Astral ==== +Inhabited by orishas, "the people of the ground and the people of the air." + +=== Religions === +Rational Culture recognizes seven main religions (Animism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Spiritism, and Christianity) responsible for the "confused evolution" and domestication of humanity. The founders of these religions would not be Buddha, Jehovah, or Jesus Christ, but rather beings inhabiting the lower astral. + +==== Spiritism ==== +Rational Culture discusses Spiritism in two ways: true spiritism and false spiritism. According to Rational Culture, true spiritism ceased its activities in 1935 and denies the legitimacy of spiritist mediums from that point onwards. + +==== Umbanda ==== +Although not recognized by Rational Culture's doctrine: once originating from Umbanda, Rational Culture continued as a branch of it, albeit with a new appearance and altered language, but with the same practices and customs, characterized by what became known among cult members as the "little room," where mediums incorporated entities and provided consultations for people, both members and non-members. These "little rooms" existed in various locations throughout the country, serving as gathering points for followers. It adopts the color of Umbanda's attire (white) and the greeting to eshus used in it. +It recognizes orishas as "the people of the ground and the people of the air," inhabitants of the Terrestrial Astral. + +== Practices == + +=== Healing === +Followers of Rational Culture practice healing through the use of herbs, oils, incense, candles, symbolic objects, reading the books, and chanting to summon entities from the Terrestrial Astral. + +=== Palmistry === +Followers of Rational Culture practice palmistry, the art of reading hands. + +== History == +After the publication of the book "Universo em Desencanto" in the mid-1930s, the religious movement continued in the following decades, having changed its headquarters from Méier to Jacarepaguá, then to Belford Roxo, where the Palácio da Cultura Racional was built. +In the 1970s, Rational Culture moved to its current headquarters in Nova Iguaçu, where it remains today. During this period, the religious movement began to be frequented by some artists, including musician Tim Maia, who brought significant visibility to the cult, leading it to its peak. During his time with Rational Culture, the singer recorded two albums that would later become critically acclaimed hits, both titled "Tim Maia Racional". In 2011, Editora Abril released a third unreleased album recorded by the singer in 1976. After leaving the cult, the singer stated: + +I joined this cult, which promised to prepare me to communicate with extraterrestrial beings. [...] When I got there, I saw that it was Umbanda, Candomblé, lower spiritism. +Jackson do Pandeiro was another artist connected to Rational Culture between 1973 and 1978, recording songs in tribute to the group, such as "Luz do Saber," recorded in 1978. +The founder of the cult, Manuel Jacinto Coelho, died in 1991, and since then, Rational Culture has been led by one of his daughters. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..44998c9dd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Rational Culture" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Culture" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:50.482618+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Band == +Rational Culture has a series of musical bands spread across 14 Brazilian states. They are formed by members of the movement itself and have as their main goal the promotion of the books of Rational Culture. Called the "Rational Universe in Disenchantment Band" - BRUD, or the "Rational Union Band" - BUR (when all bands come together), the band emerged in 1982, initially as a fanfare with percussion and some brass instruments. Over time, it evolved into a marching band, incorporating more elaborate instruments. The band has national and international coverage, and in its repertoire, there are popular songs, military tunes, anthems, and original compositions. +In addition to the marching band, Rational Culture has a symphony orchestra, the Racional Jazz Band – RJB – created in 2016, featuring string instruments such as violins, cellos, basses, and electric guitars, keyboard instruments like piano and keyboard, etc., as well as woodwinds, brass, and percussion instruments. + +== Honors == +In recognition of its initiatives, the Day of Rational Culture was established in more than one hundred and forty-five cities. +Manuel Jacinto Coelho, the founder of Rational Culture, also received honors in recognition of his work. Holding several titles, medals, and national and international awards, some of which include: Tiradentes Medal, Title of Benefactor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Honorary Medal of Inconfidência, Hipólito José Costa Commendation, Dr. Newton Cardoso Silver Plaque, honorary citizenship of Iguaçu, Citizen of Friburgo, Peace Grove Square in the state of Minas Gerais. + +== References == + +== Bibliography == +Cavalcante Modesto da Silva, Alire Cristina (2013). Cultura racional: da raiz da umbanda à negação da prática religiosa. Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFCG (master's thesis) (in Portuguese). Campina Grande, Paraíba, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Campina Grande. + +== External links == +Official website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-0.md index 3553cc724..1ef975872 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:14:37.376958+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:51.707370+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-1.md index 7620ab8a6..f307ada19 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:14:37.376958+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:51.707370+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-2.md index c3d27471e..c73e61a3a 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:14:37.376958+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:51.707370+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-3.md index 5bed3cd01..1d007b189 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:14:37.376958+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:51.707370+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-4.md index 027ee7643..fea67cb32 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-4.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive-4.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 5/5 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionless_drive" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:14:37.376958+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:51.707370+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..be131ef61 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Recovered-memory therapy" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:52.966379+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Recovered-memory therapy (RMT) is a catch-all term for a controversial and scientifically discredited form of psychotherapy that critics say utilizes one or more unproven therapeutic techniques (such as some forms of psychoanalysis, hypnosis, journaling, past life regression, guided imagery, and the use of sodium amytal interviews) to purportedly help patients recall previously forgotten memories. Proponents of recovered memory therapy claim, contrary to evidence, that traumatic memories can be buried in the subconscious and thereby affect current behavior, and that these memories can be recovered through the use of RMT techniques. RMT is not recommended by professional mental health associations. RMT can result in patients developing false memories of sexual abuse from their childhood and events such as alien abduction which had not actually occurred. + +== Terminology == +A 2018 online survey found that although 5% of a U.S. public sample reported recovering memories of abuse during therapy (abuse they reported having no previous memory of), none of them used the terminology "recovered memory therapy"—instead those recovering memories reported using a variety of other therapy types (e.g., behavioral therapy, EMDR, etc.). Practitioners of RMT generally utilize methods (such as hypnosis, age regression, guided visualization, and/or the use of substances such as sodium amytal) that are intended to recover true memories, yet known to support the creation of false memories. + +== Research == +The belief that a child can suffer horrific abuse, but immediately bury the memory deep in their psyche, remembering nothing of what had just happened, and grow up to be deeply psychologically scarred by this disassociation, while now commonplace in popular culture, is not supported by evidence. +A review article on potentially harmful therapies listed RMT as a treatment that will probably produce harm in some who receive it. Richard Ofshe, an American sociologist and expert on coerced and suggested testimony, describes the practice of "recovering" memories as fraudulent and dangerous. An inquiry by the Australian government into the practice found little support for or use of memory recovery therapies among health professionals, and warned that professionals had to be trained to avoid the creation of false memories. As part of its Crime Victims Compensation Program the state of Washington issued a report on the efficacy of RMT. It noted that the therapy had no positive benefits in the case studies analyzed and that "the ability of repressed memory patients to function in the activities of daily living is significantly and possibly irrevocably impaired as a direct result of the controversial therapy modalities.” Moreover, it recognized the potential for legal action from participants due to negative effects sustained from the program. +Studies by Elizabeth Loftus and others have concluded that it is possible to produce false memories of childhood incidents. The experiments involved manipulating subjects into believing that they had some fictitious experience in childhood, such as being lost in a shopping mall at age 6. This involved using a suggestive technique called "familial informant false narrative procedure," in which the experimenter claims the validity of the false event is supported by a family member of the subject. The study has been used to support the theory that false memories of traumatic sexual abuse can be implanted in a patient by therapists. Critics of these studies argue that the techniques do not resemble any approved or mainstream treatment modality, and there are criticisms that the implanted events used are not emotionally comparable to sexual abuse. Critics contend that Loftus's conclusions overreach the evidence. Loftus has rebutted these criticisms. +Some patients later retract memories they had previously believed to be recovered through RMT upon encountering critical literature regarding recovered memory therapy. This literature often highlights the therapy's dangerous and pseudoscientific aspects, thereby exposing them to scientific facts that prompt reconsideration. Patients have reported significant harmful effects due to the use of RMT. +A 2018 US study is the largest study known that surveys the general public about memory recovery in therapy. The study was presented to participants aged 50 years or older as a "Life Experience" survey and found that 8% of the 2,326 adults had reported seeing therapists, mostly starting in the 1990s, that discussed the possibility of repressed memories of abuse. 4% of adults had reported recovering memories of abuse in therapy for which they had no previous memory. Recovered memories of abuse were associated with most therapy types. A 1994 survey of 1000 therapists by Michael D. Yapko found that 19% of the therapists knew of a case in which a client's memory had been suggested by therapy but was in fact false. + +== Professional guidelines == +There are several individuals and groups that have published guidelines, criticisms or cautions about recovered memory therapy and techniques to stimulate recall: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a9ee36500 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +title: "Recovered-memory therapy" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:52.966379+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the Brandon Report, a set of training, practice, research and professional development recommendations, the United Kingdom's Royal College of Psychiatrists advised psychiatrists to avoid use of RMT or any "memory recovery techniques", citing a lack of evidence to support the accuracy of memories recovered in this way. +In 2004, the government of the Health Council of the Netherlands issued a report in response to inquiries from professionals regarding RMT and memories of traumatic child sexual abuse. The Health Council stated that while traumatic childhood experiences were major risk factors for psychological problems in adulthood, the fact that most traumatic memories are well-remembered but can be forgotten or become inaccessible though the influence of specific circumstances precludes a simple description of the relationship between memory and trauma. The report also notes that memories can be confabulated, re-interpreted and even apparently vivid or dramatic memories can be false, a risk that is increased when therapists, using suggestive techniques, attempt to link symptoms to past trauma, with certain patients and through the use of methods to stimulate memories. +The Australian Hypnotherapists Association (AHA) issued a similar statement, for contexts where false memories of child sexual abuse may arise. The AHA acknowledges that child sexual abuse is serious, damaging and at least some memories are genuine, while cautioning that some questioning techniques and interventions may lead to illusory memories leading to false beliefs about abuse. +The Canadian Psychological Association has issued guidelines for psychologists addressing recovered memories. Psychologists are urged to be aware of their limitations in knowledge and training regarding memory, trauma and development and "that there is no constellation of symptoms which is diagnostic of child sexual abuse". The guidelines also urge caution and awareness of the benefits and limitations of "relaxation, hypnosis, guided imagery, free associations, inner child exercises, age regression, body memory interpretation, body massage, dream interpretation, and the use of projective techniques" and special caution regarding any legal involvement of memories, abuse and therapy. + +== Legal issues == +In Ramona v. Isabella, Gary Ramona sued his daughter's therapist for implanting false memories of his abuse of her. In the first case putting recovered memory therapy, itself, on trial, he eventually was awarded $500,000 in 1994. +Discussing RMT in the New South Wales Parliament in 1995, the state Minister for Health, Andrew Refshauge – a medical practitioner – stated that the general issue of admissibility of evidence based on recovered memories was one for the Attorney General. In 2004 Australian Counselling Association issued a draft position statement regarding recovered memories in which it informed its membership of possible legal difficulties if they affirm accusations as true based solely upon discussion of a patient's recovered memories, without adequate corroborating evidence. +A degree of controversy does remain within legal circles, with some holding the view that therapists and courts should consider repressed memories the same as they consider regular memories. Three relevant studies state that repressed memories are "no more and no less accurate than continuous memories." +Recovered memory therapy was an issue in the criminal trials of some Catholic priests accused of fondling or sexually assaulting juvenile-turned-adult parishioners. +In a 2017 criminal case in Canada, a Nova Scotian clergyman, the Reverend Brent Hawkes, was acquitted in a case involving recovered memories of alleged historical sexual abuse when Justice Alan Tufts described in his ruling that the complainant's method of re-constructing his memory of alleged events after joining a men's group and hearing similar accounts from other "survivors" his evidence could not be reliable. +Several court cases awarded multimillion-dollar verdicts against Minnesota psychiatrist Diane Bay Humenansky, who used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques associated with RMT, resulting in accusations by several patients against family members that were later found to be false. +In 1999, the Netherlands Board of Prosecutors General formed The National Expert Group on Special Sexual Matters, in Dutch - Landelijke Expertisegroep Bijzondere Zedenzaken (LEBZ). LEBZ consists of a multidisciplinary group of experts whom investigating police officers and prosecutors are mandated to consult before considering arresting or prosecuting a person accused of sexual crimes involving repressed memories or recovered memory therapy. The LEBZ released a report for the period of 2003–2007 stating that 90% of the cases they consulted on were stopped due to their recommendations that the allegations were not based on reliable evidence. + +== See also == +Amnesia +Emotion and memory +Fake memoir +Gaslighting +Memory inhibition +Misery literature +Repressed memory +Psychological trauma +Satanic ritual abuse +Spectral evidence + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Freyd, Jennifer J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma – The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06805-6. +Ofshe, Richard and Watters, Ethan. Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria. University of California Press; Reprint edition, 1996, ISBN 0-520-20583-9. +Loftus, Elizabeth and Ketcham, Katherine. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse. St. Martin's Griffin 1st edition, 1996. +Lilienfeld, Scott. "Psychological treatments that cause harm." Perspectives on Psychological Science, Volume 2(1), pp. 53–70, 2007. +Knopp, Fay Honey (1996). A Primer on the Complexities of Traumatic Memory of Childhood Sexual Abuse – A Psychobiological Approach. Brandon, VT: Safer Society Press. ISBN 978-1-884444-20-3. +Pope, Kenneth S., KS (1996). "Memory, Abuse, & Science: Questioning Claims about the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic". American Psychologist. 51 (9): 957–974. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957. PMID 8819364. Retrieved 2007-12-28. +Pendergrast, Mark, Victims of Memory (1993), ISBN 0-942679-18-0 + +== External links == +Answers to questions about recovered memory by the American Psychological Association \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-0.md index 2d6d1f8fe..f3652860a 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:28.719930+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:54.198267+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-1.md index 2e75877ad..931783cf3 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:28.719930+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:54.198267+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-2.md index 43b61c7e1..845ed8933 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:28.719930+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:54.198267+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-3.md index 522a81bdc..ae9312deb 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:10:28.719930+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:54.198267+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d9fb9cf4a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Reflexology" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:55.372241+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Reflexology, also known as zone therapy, is a pseudomedical practice involving the application of pressure to specific points on the feet, ears, and hands. This is done using thumb, finger, and hand massage techniques without the use of oil or lotion. It is based on a pseudoscientific system of zones and reflex areas that purportedly reflect an image of the body on the feet and hands, with the premise that such work on the feet and hands causes a physical change to the supposedly related areas of the body. There is no convincing scientific evidence that reflexology is effective for any medical condition, or provides any health benefits. + + +== Definition == +In a Cochrane Collaboration review, reflexology is defined as follows: "Reflexology is gentle manipulation or pressing on certain parts of the foot to produce an effect elsewhere in the body." +The Australian Government's Department of Health define reflexology as "a system of applying pressure, usually to the feet, which practitioners believe stimulates energy and releases 'blockages' in specific areas that cause pain or illness." + + +== History == +Similar practices such as acupuncture have been practiced in China. Reflexology was introduced to the United States in 1913 by William H. Fitzgerald, M.D. (1872–1942), an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and Edwin F. Bowers. Fitzgerald claimed that applying pressure had an anesthetic effect on other areas of the body. It was modified in the 1930s and 1940s by Eunice D. Ingham (1889–1974), a nurse and physiotherapist. Ingham claimed that the feet and hands were especially sensitive and mapped the entire body into "reflexes" on the feet, renaming "zone therapy" as reflexology. Many of the modern reflexologists use Ingham's methods, or similar techniques of reflexologist Laura Norman. + + +== Efficacy == +In 2015, the Australian Government's Department of Health published the results of a review of alternative therapies that sought to determine if any were suitable for being covered by health insurance. Reflexology was one of 17 therapies evaluated for which no clear evidence of effectiveness was found. Accordingly, in 2017, the Australian government named reflexology as a practice that would not qualify for insurance subsidy, saying this step would "ensure taxpayer funds are expended appropriately and not directed to therapies lacking evidence". +Reviews from 2009 and 2011 have found no evidence sufficient to support the use of reflexology for any medical condition. A 2009 systematic review of randomized controlled trials concludes: "The best evidence available to date does not demonstrate convincingly that reflexology is an effective treatment for any medical condition." +There is no clinical evidence that reflexology is effective to treat cancer. Cancer Research UK have commented that "there is no scientific evidence to prove that reflexology can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer". + + +== Claimed mechanism == +There is no consensus among reflexologists on how reflexology is supposed to work; a unifying theme is the idea that areas on the foot correspond to areas of the body and that by manipulating these one can improve health through one's qi. Reflexologists divide the body into ten equal vertical zones, five on the right and five on the left. Concerns have been raised by medical professionals that treating potentially serious illnesses with reflexology, which has no proven efficacy, could delay the seeking of appropriate medical treatment. +Reflexologists posit that the blockage of an energy field, invisible life force, or Qi, can prevent healing. Another tenet of reflexology is the belief that practitioners can relieve stress and pain in other parts of the body through the manipulation of the feet. One claimed explanation is that the pressure received in the feet may send signals that 'balance' the nervous system or release chemicals such as endorphins that reduce stress and pain. These hypotheses are rejected by the medical community, which cites a lack of scientific evidence and the well-tested germ theory of disease. +Reflexology's claim to manipulate energy (Qi) is unsupported by science; there is no scientific evidence for the existence of life energy (Qi), "energy balance", "crystalline structures" or "pathways" in the body. +In Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, Simon Singh states that if indeed the hands and feet "reflect" the internal organs, reflexology might be expected to explain how such "reflection" was derived from the process of Darwinian natural selection, but Singh says that no argument or evidence has been adduced. + + +== Regulation == +In the United Kingdom, reflexology is coordinated on a voluntary basis by the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC). Registrants are required to meet Standards of Proficiency outlined by Profession Specific Boards but since CNHC is voluntary anyone practicing can describe themselves as a reflexologist. When the CNHC began admitting reflexologists, a skeptic searched for, and found, 14 of them who were claiming efficacy on illnesses. Once pointed out, the CNHC had the claims retracted as it conflicted with the UK's Advertising Standards Authority code. +Reflexology is one of the most used alternative therapies in Denmark. A national survey from 2005 showed that 21.4% of the Danish population had used reflexology at some point and 6.1% had used reflexology within the previous year. +A study from Norway showed that 5.6% of the Norwegian population in 2007 had used reflexology within the last 12 months. + + +== See also == +Acupressure +Foot massage +Shiatsu + + +== Notes == + + +== External links == +Barrett, Stephen (2004-09-25). "Reflexology: A close look". Quackwatch. Retrieved 2011-03-14. +Carroll, Robert Todd (2007-10-03). "Skeptics Dictionary: Definition of Reflexology". Retrieved 2011-03-14. +Dunning, Brian (28 January 2007). "Skeptoid #24: Reflexology: Only Dangerous If You Use It". Skeptoid. Retrieved 22 June 2017. +AQTN (2013). "Reflexology in the scientific literature – unbiased compilation" (PDF). \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_fallacy-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_fallacy-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c82def4ea --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_fallacy-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Regression fallacy" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_fallacy" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:56.549495+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The regression (or regressive) fallacy is an informal fallacy. It assumes that something has returned to normal because of corrective actions taken while it was abnormal. This fails to account for natural fluctuations. It is frequently a special kind of the post hoc fallacy. + + +== Explanation == +Things like golf scores, the earth's temperature, and chronic back pain fluctuate naturally and usually regress toward the mean. The logical flaw is to make predictions that expect exceptional results to continue as if they were average (see Representativeness heuristic). People are most likely to take action when variance is at its peak. Then after results become more normal they believe that their action was the cause of the change when in fact it was not causal. +This use of the word "regression" was coined by Sir Francis Galton in a study from 1885 called "Regression Toward Mediocrity in Hereditary Stature". He showed that the height of children from very short or very tall parents would move toward the average. In fact, in any situation where two variables are less than perfectly correlated, an exceptional score on one variable may not be matched by an equally exceptional score on the other variable. The imperfect correlation between parents and children (height is not entirely heritable) means that the distribution of heights of their children will be centered somewhere between the average of the parents and the average of the population as whole. Thus, any single child can be more extreme than the parents, but the odds are against it. + + +== Examples == +When his pain got worse, he went to a doctor, after which the pain subsided a little. Therefore, he benefited from the doctor's treatment. +The pain subsiding a little after it has gotten worse is more easily explained by regression toward the mean. Assuming the pain relief was caused by the doctor is fallacious. + +The student did exceptionally poorly last semester, so I punished him. He did much better this semester. Clearly, punishment is effective in improving students' grades. +Often exceptional performances are followed by more normal performances, so the change in performance might better be explained by regression toward the mean. Incidentally, some experiments have shown that people may develop a systematic bias for punishment and against reward because of reasoning analogous to this example of the regression fallacy. + +The frequency of accidents on a road fell after a speed camera was installed. Therefore, the speed camera has improved road safety. +Speed cameras are often installed after a road incurs an exceptionally high number of accidents, and this value usually falls (regression to mean) immediately afterward. Many speed camera proponents attribute this fall in accidents to the speed camera, without observing the overall trend. +Some authors use the Sports Illustrated cover jinx as an example of a regression effect: extremely good performances are likely to be followed by less extreme ones, and athletes are chosen to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated only after extreme performances. Attributing this to a "jinx" rather than regression, as some athletes reportedly believe, is an example of committing the regression fallacy. + + +== Misapplication == +On the other hand, dismissing valid explanations can lead to a worse situation. For example: + +After the Western Allies invaded Normandy, creating a second major front, German control of Europe waned. Clearly, the combination of the Western Allies and the USSR drove the Germans back. +Fallacious evaluation: "Given that the counterattacks against Germany occurred only after they had conquered the greatest amount of territory under their control, regression toward the mean can explain the retreat of German forces from occupied territories as a purely random fluctuation that would have happened without any intervention on the part of the USSR or the Western Allies." However, this was not the case. The reason is that political power and occupation of territories is not primarily determined by random events, making the concept of regression toward the mean inapplicable (on the large scale). +In essence, misapplication of regression toward the mean can reduce all events to a just-so story, without cause or effect. (Such misapplication takes as a premise that all events are random, as they must be for the concept of regression toward the mean to be validly applied.) + + +== Notes == + + +== References == +Friedman, Milton (1992). "Do Old Fallacies Ever Die?". Journal of Economic Literature. 30 (4): 2129–2132. JSTOR 2727976. +Gilovich, Thomas (1991). How we know what isn't so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0029117054. +Plous, Scott (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision making. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0070504776. +Quah, Danny (1993). "Galton's Fallacy and Tests of the Convergence Hypothesis". The Scandinavian Journal of Economics. 95 (4): 427–433. doi:10.2307/3440905. hdl:1721.1/63653. JSTOR 3440905. +Schaffner, P.E. (1985). "Specious learning about reward and punishment". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 48 (6): 1377–86. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.48.6.1377. + + +== External links == +Fallacy files: Regression fallacy \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f344f020c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Reiki" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:57.770385+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Reiki is a pseudoscientific form of energy healing, a type of alternative medicine created by Mikao Usui in Japan in the 1920s. Reiki practitioners use a technique called palm healing or hands-on healing through which, according to practitioners, a "universal energy" is transferred through the palms of the practitioner to the client, to encourage emotional or physical healing. It is based on qi (chi), which practitioners say is a universal life force; there is no empirical evidence that such a life force exists. +Reiki is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles. Its marketing has been described as "fraudulent misrepresentation", and reiki itself as a "nonsensical method", with a recommendation that the United States government agency NCCIH stop funding reiki research because it "has no substantiated health value and lacks a scientifically plausible rationale". +Clinical research does not show reiki to be effective as a treatment for any medical condition, including cancer, diabetic neuropathy, anxiety, or depression. There is no proof of the effectiveness of reiki therapy compared to placebo. Studies reporting positive effects have had methodological flaws. +It has no plausible mechanism or proven medical benefit, and major medical organizations do not recommend it as a treatment, especially in place of evidence-based care. While generally low-risk, concerns exist that patients might forgo effective treatments. Reiki has no standardized regulation or certification. + +== Etymology == +According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English alternative medicine word reiki comes from Japanese reiki (霊気) "mysterious atmosphere, miraculous sign", combining rei "universal" and ki "vital energy"—the Sino-Japanese reading of Chinese língqì (靈氣) "numinous atmosphere". + +== Conceptual basis == + +Reiki's teachings and adherents claim that qi is a physiological force that can be manipulated to treat a disease or condition. There is no evidence for the existence of qi. Reiki is classified as a pseudoscientific practice based on confusion between metaphysical and empirical concepts. +Most research on reiki is poorly designed and prone to bias. There is no reliable empirical evidence that reiki is helpful for treating any medical condition, although some physicians have said it might help promote feelings of general well-being. In 2011, William T. Jarvis of The National Council Against Health Fraud stated there "is no evidence that clinical reiki's effects are due to anything other than suggestion" or the placebo effect. +The 22 April 2014 Skeptoid podcast episode entitled "Your Body's Alleged Energy Fields" relates a reiki practitioner's report of what was happening as she passed her hands over a subject's body: + +What we'll be looking for here, within John's auric field, is any areas of intense heat, unusual coldness, a repelling energy, a dense energy, a magnetizing energy, tingling sensations, or actually the body attracting the hands into that area where it needs the reiki energy, and balancing of John's qi. + +== Technique == +A session usually lasts for approximately one hour. A "Level 1" practitioner places their hand or hands on or near various parts of the body for several minutes. During this time, a vital energy is meant to flow from the practitioner into the client's body. "Level 2" practitioners alternatively may offer their services at a distance with no skin contact. + +== Research and critical evaluation == +Reiki is used as an illustrative example of pseudoscience in scholarly texts and academic journal articles. David Gorski writes that reiki vies with homeopathy to be the "one quackery that rules them all" because of its "sheer ridiculousness and disconnect from reality". Jann Bellamy, a lawyer and critic of alternative medicine, has described the marketing of reiki as "fraudulent misrepresentation". +In criticizing the State University of New York for offering a continuing education course on reiki, one source stated, "reiki postulates the existence of a universal energy unknown to science and thus far undetectable surrounding the human body, which practitioners can learn to manipulate using their hands," and others said, "In spite of its [reiki's] diffusion, the baseline mechanism of action has not been demonstrated ..." and, "Neither the forces involved nor the alleged therapeutic benefits have been demonstrated by scientific testing." +Several authors have pointed to the vitalistic energy that reiki is claimed to treat, with one saying, "Ironically, the only thing that distinguishes reiki from therapeutic touch is that it [reiki] involves actual touch," and others stating that the International Center for Reiki Training "mimic[s] the institutional aspects of science" seeking legitimacy but holds no more promise than an alchemy society. +A guideline published by the American Academy of Neurology, the American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine, and the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation states, "Reiki therapy should probably not be considered for the treatment of PDN [painful diabetic neuropathy]." Canadian sociologist Susan J. Palmer has listed reiki as among the pseudoscientific healing methods used by cults in France to attract members. +Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch describes reiki as a "nonsensical method". As a reason for why NCCAM should stop funding reiki research, he writes: "Reiki has no substantiated health value and lacks a scientifically plausible rationale. Science-based healthcare settings should not tolerate its use, and scarce government research dollars should not be used to study it further." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ec33973fe --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +title: "Reiki" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:57.770385+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Evidence quality === +A 2008 systematic review of nine randomized clinical trials found several shortcomings in the literature on reiki. Depending on the tools used to measure depression and anxiety, the results varied and were not reliable or valid. Furthermore, the scientific community has been unable to replicate the findings of studies that support reiki. The review also found issues with the reporting methodology in some of the literature, in that parts were often omitted completely or not clearly described. Frequently in these studies, sample sizes were not calculated, and adequate allocation and double-blind procedures were not followed. The review also reported that such studies exaggerated the effectiveness of treatment and failed to control for differences in the experience of reiki practitioners or for the possibility that the same practitioner might produce different outcomes at different times. None of the studies in the review provided a rationale for the treatment duration, and no study reported adverse effects. + +=== Safety === + +Safety concerns for reiki sessions are very low and are akin to those of many complementary and alternative medicine practices. Some physicians and health care providers, however, believe that patients may unadvisedly substitute proven treatments for life-threatening conditions with unproven alternative modalities, including reiki, thus endangering their health. + +=== Catholic Church concerns === +In March 2009, the Committee on Doctrine of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued the document Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy, in which they declared that the practice of reiki was based on superstition, being neither truly faith healing nor science-based medicine: "Reiki lacks scientific credibility. It has not been accepted by the scientific and medical communities as an effective therapy." It stated that reiki was incompatible with Christian spirituality since it involved belief in a human power over healing rather than prayer to God, and that, viewed as a natural means of healing, it lacked scientific credibility. The 2009 guideline concluded that "since reiki therapy is not compatible with either Christian teaching or scientific evidence, it would be inappropriate for Catholic institutions, such as Catholic health care facilities and retreat centers, or persons representing the Church, such as Catholic chaplains, to promote or to provide support for reiki therapy." Since this announcement, some Catholic laypeople have continued to practice reiki, but it has been removed from many Catholic hospitals and other institutions. +In a December 2014 article from the USCCB's Committee on Divine Worship on exorcism and its use in the Church, reiki is listed as a practice "that may have [negatively] impacted the current state of the afflicted person". + +== Training, certification and adoption == +A reiki practitioner who offers teaching is known as a "reiki master". +There is no central authority controlling use of the words reiki or reiki master. Certificates can be purchased online for under $100. It is "not uncommon" for a course to offer attainment of reiki master in two weekends. There is no regulation of practitioners or reiki master in the United States. +The Washington Post reported in 2014 that in response to customer demand, at least 60 hospitals in the United States offered reiki, at a cost of between $40 and $300 per session. Cancer Research UK reported in 2019 that some cancer centers and hospices in the UK offer free or low-cost reiki for people with cancer. The cost per session for treatment vary widely, but a CNBC report found a practitioner charging $229 per session of 60–90 minutes. + +== History == + +Mikao Usui originated the practice in Japan. According to the inscription on his memorial stone, Usui taught his system of reiki to more than 2,000 people during his lifetime. While teaching reiki in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, Usui suffered a stroke and died on 9 March 1926. +The first reiki clinic in the United States was started in 1970 by Hawayo Takata, a student of Chujiro Hayashi (who was a disciple of Usui). + +== See also == + +Glossary of alternative medicine +List of ineffective cancer treatments +Scientific skepticism +The Force + +== Notes == + +== References == + +== Further reading == + +National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (4 May 2010). "Reiki: An Introduction (NCCAM Backgrounder)". Retrieved 5 May 2010. + +== External links == +"Reiki Can't Possibly Work. So Why Does It?", 2020 article in The Atlantic \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d1df62d4e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Remote viewing" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:58.889435+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Remote viewing (RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen subject, purportedly sensing with the mind. There is no scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and the topic of remote viewing is generally regarded as pseudoscience. A remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person, or location hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, parapsychology researchers at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), are generally credited with coining the term "remote viewing" to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance. According to Targ, the term was first suggested by Ingo Swann in December 1971 during an experiment at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City. +Remote viewing experiments have historically lacked proper controls and repeatability. +The idea of remote viewing received renewed attention in the 1990s upon the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. government that attempted to determine potential military applications of psychic phenomena. The program ran from 1975 to 1995 and ended after evaluators concluded that remote viewers consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence information. + +== History == + +=== Early background === +In early occult and spiritualist literature, remote viewing was known as telesthesia and traveling clairvoyance. Rosemary Guiley described it as "seeing remote or hidden objects clairvoyantly with the inner eye, or in alleged out-of-body travel." +The study of psychic phenomena by major scientists started in the mid-nineteenth century. Early researchers included Michael Faraday, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rufus Osgood Mason, and William Crookes. Their work predominantly involved carrying out focused experimental tests on individuals thought to be psychically gifted. Reports of apparently successful tests were met with much skepticism from the scientific community. +In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine expanded the study of paranormal performance into larger populations by using standard experimental protocols with unselected human subjects. But, as with the earlier studies, Rhine was reluctant to publicize this work too early because of the fear of criticism from mainstream scientists. +Paranormal studies remained a fringe area of scientific exploration. However, by the 1960s, the prevailing counterculture attitudes were sympathetic to paranormal ideas. The emergence of what is termed "New Age" thinking and the popularity of the Human Potential Movement provoked a mini-renaissance that renewed public interest in consciousness studies and psychic phenomena. It also helped to make financial support more available for research into such topics. +In the early 1970s, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International), where they initiated studies of the paranormal that were, at first, supported with private funding from the Parapsychology Foundation and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. +In the late 1970s, the physicists John Taylor and Eduardo Balanovski tested the psychic Matthew Manning in remote viewing, and the results proved "completely unsuccessful". +One of the early experiments, lauded by proponents as having improved the methodology of remote viewing testing and raising future experimental standards, was criticized as leaking information to the participants by inadvertently leaving clues. Some later experiments had negative results when these clues were eliminated. +The viewers' advice in the Stargate Project was always so unclear and non-detailed that it has never been used in any intelligence operation. In a 2005 interview with GQ magazine, former president Jimmy Carter recalled a time during his presidency when the administration was searching for a small twin-engine plane that had gone down somewhere in Africa. According to Carter's recollection, the director of the CIA told him that the plane had been located by a woman in California who claimed to be a psychic medium. Carter recalled he responded to the claim "with skepticism", saying "Whether it was just a gross coincidence or... I don't know." + +=== Decline and termination === +In the early 1990s, the Military Intelligence Board, chaired by Defense Intelligence Agency chief Harry E. Soyster, appointed Army Colonel William Johnson to manage the remote viewing unit and evaluate its objective usefulness. Funding dissipated in late 1994, and the program declined. The project was transferred from DIA to the CIA in 1995. +In 1995, the CIA hired the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to perform a retrospective evaluation of the results generated by the Stargate Project. Reviewers included Ray Hyman and Jessica Utts. Utts maintained that there had been a statistically significant positive effect, with some subjects scoring 5–15% above chance. Hyman argued that Utts' conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist "is premature, to say the least." Hyman said the findings had yet to be replicated independently, and that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning". Based upon both of their studies, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the $20 million project in 1995. Time magazine stated in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget at Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon be closed. +The AIR report concluded that no usable intelligence data was produced in the program. David Goslin of the American Institute for Research said, "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8fefe1e80 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Remote viewing" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:58.889435+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== PEAR's Remote Perception program === +Beginning in the late 1970s, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) carried out extensive research on remote viewing. By 1989, it had conducted 336 formal trials, reporting a composite z-score of 6.355, with a corresponding p-value of 1.04×10−10. In a 1992 critique of these results, Hansen, Utts and Markwick concluded "The PEAR remote-viewing experiments depart from commonly accepted criteria for formal research in science. In fact, they are undoubtedly some of the poorest quality ESP experiments published in many years." The lab responded that "none of the stated complaints compromises the PEAR experimental protocols or analytical methods" and reaffirmed their results. +Following Utts' emphasis on replication and Hyman's challenge on interlaboratory consistency in the AIR report, PEAR conducted several hundred trials to see if they could replicate the SAIC and SRI experiments. They created an analytical judgment methodology to replace the human judging process criticized in past experiments, and they released a report in 1996. They felt the results of the experiments were consistent with the SRI experiments. However, statistical flaws have been proposed by others in the parapsychological community and within the general scientific community. + +== Scientific reception == +A variety of scientific studies on remote viewing have been conducted. Early experiments produced positive results, but they had invalidating flaws. None of the more recent experiments have shown positive results when conducted under properly controlled conditions. This lack of successful experiments has led the mainstream scientific community to reject remote viewing, based upon the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results. +Science writers Gary Bennett, Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer and professor of neurology Terence Hines describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience. +C. E. M. Hansel, who evaluated the remote viewing experiments of parapsychologists such as Puthoff, Targ, John B. Bisha, and Brenda J. Dunne, noted that there was a lack of controls, and precautions were not taken to rule out the possibility of fraud. He concluded the experimental design was inadequately reported and "too loosely controlled to serve any useful function." +The psychologist Ray Hyman says that, even if the results from remote viewing experiments were reproduced under specified conditions, they would still not be a conclusive demonstration of the existence of psychic functioning. He blames this on the reliance on a negative outcome—the claims on ESP are based on the results of experiments not being explained by normal means. He says that the experiments lack a positive theory that guides as to what to control on them and what to ignore, and that "Parapsychologists have not come close to (having a positive theory) as yet". +Hyman also says that the amount and quality of the experiments on RV are far too low to convince the scientific community to "abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles" due to its findings still not being replicated successfully under scrutiny. +Martin Gardner has written that the founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist before his work at Stanford University, which influenced his research at SRI. In 1970, the Church of Scientology published a notarized letter that Puthoff had written while he was conducting research on remote viewing at Stanford. The letter read, in part: "Although critics viewing the system Scientology from the outside may form the impression that Scientology is just another of many quasi-educational quasi-religious 'schemes,' it is in fact a highly sophistical and highly technological system more characteristic of modern corporate planning and applied technology". Among some of the ideas that Puthoff supported regarding remote viewing was the claim in the 1908 book Occult Chemistry that two followers of Madame Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, were able to remote-view the inner structure of atoms. +Michael Shermer investigated remote viewing experiments and discovered a problem with the target selection list. According to Shermer, with the sketches, only a handful of designs are usually used, such as lines and curves, which could depict any object and be interpreted as a "hit". Shermer has also written about confirmation and hindsight biases that have occurred in remote viewing experiments. +Various skeptic organizations have conducted experiments for remote viewing and other alleged paranormal abilities, with no positive results under properly controlled conditions. + +=== Sensory cues === +The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff's remote viewing experiments that were carried out in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute. In a series of 35 studies, they could not replicate the results, so they investigated the procedure of the original experiments. Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to which order they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets or having the session date written at the top of the page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the experiment's high hit rates. According to Terence Hines: + +Examination of the few actual transcripts published by Targ and Puthoff show that just such clues were present. To find out if the unpublished transcripts contained cues, Marks and Kammann wrote to Targ and Puthoff requesting copies. It is almost unheard of for a scientist to refuse to provide his data for independent examination when asked, but Targ and Puthoff consistently refused to allow Marks and Kammann to see copies of the transcripts. Marks and Kammann were, however, able to obtain copies of the transcripts from the judge who used them. The transcripts were found to contain a wealth of cues. +Thomas Gilovich has written: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a52b995ec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Remote viewing" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:24:58.889435+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Most of the material in the transcripts consists of the honest attempts by the percipients to describe their impressions. However, the transcripts also contained considerable extraneous material that could aid a judge in matching them to the correct targets. In particular, there were numerous references to dates, times and sites previously visited that would enable the judge to place the transcripts in proper sequence... Astonishingly, the judges in the Targ-Puthoff experiments were given a list of target sites in the exact order in which they were used in the tests! +According to Marks, when the cues were eliminated the results fell to a chance level. Marks achieved 100 percent accuracy using cues alone, without visiting any of the sites himself. James Randi has written that controlled tests by several other researchers, eliminating several sources of cueing and extraneous evidence present in the original tests, produced negative results. Students also solved Puthoff and Targ's locations from the clues in the transcripts. +Marks and Kamman concluded: "Until remote viewing can be confirmed in conditions which prevent sensory cueing the conclusions of Targ and Puthoff remain an unsubstantiated hypothesis." In 1980, Charles Tart claimed that a rejudging of the transcripts from one of Targ and Puthoff's experiments revealed an above-chance result. Targ and Puthoff again refused to provide copies of the transcripts and it was not until July 1985 that they were made available for study when it was discovered they still contained sensory cues. Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote, "Considering the importance for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart's failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension. As previously concluded, remote viewing has not been demonstrated in the experiments conducted by Puthoff and Targ, only the repeated failure of the investigators to remove sensory cues." +The information from the Stargate Project remote viewing sessions was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data. The project was never useful in any intelligence operation, and it was suspected that the project managers, in some cases, changed the reports so they would fit background cues. +Marks in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) discussed the flaws in the Stargate Project in detail. He wrote that the experiments had several flaws. The possibility of cues or sensory leakage was not ruled out, the experiments were not independently replicated, and some of the experiments were conducted in secret, making peer review impossible. He further noted that the judge, Edwin May, was also the principal investigator for the project, risking a significant conflict of interest. Marks concluded the project was nothing more than a "subjective delusion", and after two decades of research, it had failed to provide any scientific evidence for remote viewing. +Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) has pointed out several problems with one of the early experiments at SAIC, including information leakage. However, he indicated the importance of its process-oriented approach and of its refining of remote viewing methodology, which meant that researchers replicating their work could avoid these problems. Wiseman later insisted there were multiple opportunities for participants in that experiment to be influenced by cues and that these cues can affect the results when they appear. + +== Selected study participants == +Courtney Brown, political scientist and founder of the Farsight Institute +Uri Geller, the subject of a study by Targ and Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute +David Marks, a critic of remote viewing, after finding sensory cues and editing in the original transcripts generated by Targ and Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s +Joseph McMoneagle, an early remote viewer See: Stargate Project +Pat Price, an early remote viewer +Ingo Swann, a research participant in remote viewing + +== See also == +Astral projection +Bilocation +Body of light +Divination +Edgar Cayce +Extrasensory perception +List of topics characterized as pseudoscience +Lucid dreaming +Parapsychology research at SRI +Project MKUltra +Scrying +Suspect Zero (film) +The Men Who Stare at Goats (film) +Third eye + +== Notes == + +== Footnotes == + +== Further reading == +Alcock, James E.; Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance: Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences Education: National Research Council (NRC) (1988). "Part VI. Parapsychological Techniques". Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques, Background Papers (Complete Set). Washington, DC: National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/778. ISBN 978-0-3090-7810-8. +Brown, Courtney. (2005). Remote Viewing: The Science and Theory of Nonphysical Perception. Farsight Press. ISBN 0-9766-7621-4 +Gordon, Henry. (1988). Extrasensory Deception: ESP, Psychics, Shirley MacLaine, Ghosts, UFOs. Macmillan of Canada. ISBN 0-7715-9539-5 +McMoneagle, Joseph. (2002). The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. Hampton Roads. ISBN 1-5717-4225-5 +Randi, James. (1982). Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-8797-5198-3 +Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as of 2021, the CIA reading room has included declassified documents: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/search/site/Remote%20viewing + +== External links == +Remote viewing – Skeptic's Dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..965848d50 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +title: "Reptilian conspiracy theory" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:00.078214+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Reptilians (also called archons, reptoids, reptiloids, saurians, draconians, or lizard people) are reptilian humanoids, which play a prominent role in fantasy, science fiction, ufology, and conspiracy theories. The idea of reptilians was popularised by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist who claims shapeshifting reptilian aliens control Earth by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate human societies. Icke has stated on multiple occasions that many world leaders were, or are possessed by, so-called reptilians. + + +== Origins == +Michael Barkun, professor of political science at Syracuse University, posits that the idea of a reptilian conspiracy originated in the fiction of Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, in his story "The Shadow Kingdom" (1929). This story drew on theosophical ideas of the "lost worlds" of Atlantis and Lemuria, particularly Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888), with its reference to "'dragon-men' who once had a mighty civilization on a Lemurian continent". +Howard's "serpent men" were described as humanoids (with human bodies and snake heads) who were able to imitate humans at will, and who lived in underground passages and used their shapechanging and mind-control abilities to infiltrate humanity. Clark Ashton Smith used Howard's "serpent men" in his stories, as well as themes from H. P. Lovecraft, and he, Howard and Lovecraft together laid the basis for the Cthulhu Mythos. +In the 1940s, American occultist Maurice Doreal (also known as Claude Doggins) wrote a pamphlet entitled "Mysteries of the Gobi" that described a "serpent race" with "bodies like man but...heads...like a great snake" and an ability to take human form. These creatures also appeared in Doreal's poem "The Emerald Tablets", in which he referred to Emerald Tablets written by "Thoth, an Atlantean Priest king". Barkun asserts that "in all likelihood", Doreal's ideas came from "The Shadow Kingdom", and that in turn, "The Emerald Tablets" formed the basis for David Icke's book, Children of the Matrix (2001). +Historian Edward Guimont has argued that the reptilian conspiracy theory, particularly as expounded by Icke, drew from earlier pseudohistorical legends developed during the colonisation of Africa, particularly surrounding Great Zimbabwe and the mokele-mbembe. + + +== Alien abduction == +Alien abduction narratives sometimes allege contact with reptilian creatures. One of the earliest reports was that of Ashland, Nebraska police officer Herbert Schirmer, who under hypnosis recalled being taken aboard a UFO in 1967 by humanoid beings with a slightly reptilian appearance, who wore a "winged serpent" emblem on the left side of their chests. Skeptics consider his claims to be a hoax. + + +== David Icke == +According to British conspiracy theorist David Icke, who first published on this theme in his 1999 work The Biggest Secret, tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system, now hiding in underground bases, are the force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity. He contends that most of the world's ancient and modern leaders are related to these reptilians, including the Merovingian dynasty, the Rothschilds, the Bush family and the British Royal family. Icke's conspiracy theories now have supporters in up to 47 countries and he has given lectures to crowds of up to 6,000 people. +American writer Vicki Santillano included Icke's conspiracy theory in her list of the 10 most popular conspiracy theories. A poll of Americans in 2013 by Public Policy Polling indicated that 4% of registered voters (±2.8%) believed in David Icke's ideas. + + +== Politics == +On September 12, 2003, during the provincial election campaign in Ontario, Canada, the Ernie Eves campaign issued a news release that called opponent Dalton McGuinty an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet". The words appeared at the end of the news release. Eves said the epithet was meant as a joke, and acknowledged the words were "over the top", but refused to apologize. +In the closely-fought 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota between comedian and commentator Al Franken and incumbent Senator Norm Coleman, one of the ballots challenged by Coleman included a vote for Franken with "Lizard People" written in the space provided for write-in candidates. Lucas Davenport, who later claimed to have written the gag ballot, said, "I don't know if you've heard the conspiracy theory about the Lizard Men; a friend of mine, we didn't like the candidates, so we were at first going to write in 'revolution', because we thought that was good and to the point. And then, we thought 'the Lizard People' would be even funnier." Franken won the election after recount. +In February 2011, on the Opie and Anthony radio show, the comedian Louis C.K. jokingly asked former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a number of times if he and Dick Cheney were lizard people who enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Amused by Rumsfeld's refusal to directly answer the question, C.K. suggested it was a possible admission of guilt. He went on to further muse that perhaps those who are lizard people cannot lie about it; when asked if they are lizards, they either have to avoid answering the question or say yes. +On March 4, 2013, a video depicting a security agent with unusual features guarding a speech by U.S. President Barack Obama was spotlighted in a Wired report about shapeshifting reptilian humanoids. This led to a tongue-in-cheek response from chief National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden who said "any alleged program to guard the president with aliens or robots would likely have to be scaled back or eliminated in the sequester". +In October 2022, Dutch MP Thierry Baudet, head of the far-right Forum for Democracy, said in an interview with the "Geopolitics and Empire" podcast that he believes that the world is "being governed by evil reptiles". +Some adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory have also borrowed from the reptilian conspiracy theory, including elements shared in antisemitic conspiracy theories. + + +== See also == + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +Dunning, Brian (May 21, 2007). "Skeptoid #46: Support Your Local Reptoid". Skeptoid. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_speech-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_speech-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..502902694 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_speech-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Reverse speech" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_speech" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:01.268355+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Reverse speech is a pseudoscientific topic first advocated by David John Oates which gained publicity when it was mentioned on Art Bell's nightly Coast to Coast AM radio talk show. It is based upon the theory that during spoken language production, human speakers subconsciously produce hidden messages that give insights into their innermost thoughts. Oates claims that it therefore has applications in psychotherapy, criminology and business negotiation. The theory has been rejected by mainstream science and academia. + + +== Claims == + +Oates' claim is that, on average, once in every 15–20 seconds of casual conversation a person produces two related sentences—a "forward-spoken" message that is heard consciously, and a "backwards" message unconsciously embedded in the person's speech. These two modes of speech, forward and backward, are supposedly dependent upon each other and form an integral part of human communication. In the dynamics of interpersonal communication, both modes of speech combine to communicate the total psyche of the person, conscious as well as unconscious. Oates claims that backward speech is always honest and reveals the truth about the speaker's intentions and motivations. The most famous recording that allegedly demonstrates this is the speech given by Neil Armstrong at the time of the first human lunar landing on 20 July 1969. If played backwards, the words "small step for man" sound somewhat like "Man will spacewalk." +An alternative explanation for this phenomenon is pareidolia, the tendency of the human brain to perceive meaningful patterns in random noise. Pareidolia is even more likely to occur when a person consciously tries to detect a pattern, as is the case for someone listening for intelligible phrases in backwards speech. The power of suggestion is then used to nudge the listener to hear what the presenter wants him to hear. David John Oates, for example, almost always tells the listener in advance what he should expect to hear, thereby planting a suggestion that would make the listener more likely to actually "hear" that phrase. A study has shown that when listening to the same clips without being told in advance what to expect, the results have a higher variation. + + +== Rejection by the scientific community == +Most academics in the field of linguistics have not paid attention to Oates' work, and it has been called a pseudoscience. For the most part, universities and research institutes have refused to test Oates' theories because of a lack of theoretical basis to make his predictions even worth testing, and the fact that many of his claims are untestable, but one of the few scientific experiments to evaluate Oates' claims did not support his findings. Others have criticized "reverse speech" as lacking a rigorous methodology and not being informed by an understanding of issues in linguistics, and characterized Oates as "more interested in making a profit than educating others," pointing out the large amount of merchandise and services his website sells. Reverse speech has been compared to the controversial field (labelled a pseudoscience by some) of neuro-linguistic programming. Because of the "dogmatic" tone of Oates' material, reverse speech has been compared to "fringe literature." +Oates' own claims about the applications of reverse speech have also been challenged. One report has questioned whether reverse speech was ever really used in police work, as Oates claimed. Likewise, his claim that reverse speech has applications in psychology and psychotherapy is not supported by mainstream research in those fields. Oates' work has been described as "dangerous" because of its potential for misuse and the likelihood of leading to false accusations of people in criminal courts, similarly to the controversial practice of facilitated communication. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revici's_Guided_Chemotherapy-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revici's_Guided_Chemotherapy-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3e83ab9b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revici's_Guided_Chemotherapy-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Revici's Guided Chemotherapy" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revici's_Guided_Chemotherapy" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:02.450361+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Revici's Guided Chemotherapy is an ineffective cancer treatment devised by Emanuel Revici (1896–1997), a physician from Romania. +Revici's early work on experimental chemical-based treatments for cancer between 1920–1941 attracted a degree of support. However, his work increasingly found disfavor with the scientific and medical communities, and his medical license was revoked in 1993. +Revici's Guided Chemotherapy is based on the idea that all illness is caused by an "imbalance" of metabolism. People with cancer were divided into two groups, which he called catabolic and anabolic, based on the pH of their urine and similar tests that were unrelated to the type or location of the cancer. The people in his two groups were given different treatments. The treatment was to give a mixture of chemical substances (such as glycerol, n-butyl alcohol, and sulfurated vegetable oil) by mouth or injection. +A Clinical Appraisal Group was organized in January 1963 to evaluate Revici's cancer treatment. The group found that the treatment had no effect on tumors, that two-thirds of his cancer patients died during treatment, and that overall 85% of them died. The group concluded that the treatment has no value. +The American Cancer Society notes that Revici's Guided "chemotherapy" is different from modern conventional chemotherapy, and states: "Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Revici's guided chemotherapy is effective in treating cancer or any other disease. It may also cause potentially serious side effects." + + +== See also == +List of unproven and disproven cancer treatments +Humorism – ancient Greek idea that illness is caused by imbalance in the body instead of germs + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +American Cancer Society (1 March 1989). "Unproven methods of cancer management: Revici Method". CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. 39 (2): 119–122. doi:10.3322/canjclin.39.2.119. PMID 2495156. +Revici, Emanuel (1961). "Research In Physiopathology As Basis Of Guided Chemotherapy With Special Application To Cancer" \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dcefa2f40 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Richard W. Leopold Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_W._Leopold_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:21.493650+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Richard W. Leopold Prize is awarded biennially by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Professor Richard W. Leopold (1912–2006) was President of the OAH in 1976–1977. +A three-member committee, chosen by the President of the OAH, chooses the best history book on U.S. federal government agencies, U.S. foreign policies, U.S. military affairs, or biographies of government officials. Only non-academic historians are eligible for the Prize, preferably historians employed by federal government agencies. The winning author receives $1,500. In 1990, the prize went to two books. In 2002, the prize went to two books, one of which had two authors. In these years, the authors split the prize money. +In the listing below, the author links lead to the latest available biographical data. Unfortunately, few government employees have sites comparable to those sites in academia. The institutional affiliation listed is that at the time the awards was given, and the links are to those institutions. In both cases, “Wikipedia” sites, where available, were given preference. + + +== Recipients == + + +== See also == +List of history awards + + +== References == + + +== External links == +OAH \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ff6ef53dc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +--- +title: "Rocket Madsen Space Lab" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Madsen_Space_Lab" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:44.607952+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Rocket Madsen Space Lab (often called RML Spacelab) was a laboratory established by engineer and convicted murderer Peter Madsen on 16 July 2014 in Copenhagen, after he left Copenhagen Suborbitals. +Rocket Madsen Space Lab was located in the Horizontal Assembly Building (HAB) of the old B&W shipyard at Refshaleøen in Copenhagen. In this building Peter Madsen researched, developed and built rockets based on H2O2 / polyurethane hybrid engines. +In preparation was Flight Alpha, which was expected to reach an altitude of 14 km. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..80b4d1714 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Rod (optical phenomenon)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:03.572980+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In cryptozoology and ufology, "rods" (also known as "skyfish", "air rods", or "solar entities") are elongated visual artifacts appearing in photographic images and video recordings. +Most optical analyses to date have concluded that the images are insects moving across the frame as the photo is being captured, although some cryptozoologists and ufologists still claim that they are paranormal in nature. + + +== Optical analysis == +Robert Todd Carroll (2003), having consulted an entomologist (Doug Yanega), identified rods as images of flying insects recorded over several cycles of wing-beating on video recording devices. The insect captured on image a number of times, while propelling itself forward, gives the illusion of a single elongated rod-like body, with bulges. +A 2000 report by staff at "The Straight Dope" also explained rods as such phenomena, namely tricks of light which result from how (primarily video) images of flying insects are recorded and played back, adding that investigators have shown the rod-like bodies to be a result of motion blur, if the camera is shooting with relatively long exposure times. +The claims of these being extraordinary creatures, possibly alien, have been advanced by either people with active imaginations, or hoaxers. +In August 2005, China Central Television (CCTV) aired a two-part documentary about flying rods in China. It reported the events from May to June of the same year at Tonghua Zhenguo Pharmaceutical Company in Tonghua City, Jilin Province, which debunked the flying rods. Surveillance cameras in the facility's compound captured video footage of flying rods identical to those shown in José Escamilla's video. Getting no satisfactory answer to the phenomenon, curious scientists at the facility decided that they would try to solve the mystery by attempting to catch these airborne creatures. Huge nets were set up and the same surveillance cameras then captured images of rods flying into the trap. When the nets were inspected, the "rods" were no more than regular moths and other ordinary flying insects. Subsequent investigations proved that the appearance of flying rods on video was an optical illusion created by the slower recording speed of the camera. +After attending a lecture by José Escamilla, UFO investigator Robert Sheaffer wrote that "some of his 'rods' were obviously insects zipping across the field at a high angular rate" and others appeared to be "appendages" which were birds' wings blurred by the camera exposure. + + +== Paranormal claims == +Various paranormal interpretations of this phenomenon appear in popular culture. One of the more outspoken proponents of rods as alien life forms was José Escamilla, who claimed to have been the first to film them on March 19, 1994, in Roswell, New Mexico, while attempting to film a UFO. Escamilla later made additional videos and embarked on lecture tours to promote his claims. + + +== Explanatory notes == + + +== See also == +Optical phenomena +Orb (optics) + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Jose Escamilla's "Rods" Video Sequences +Dunning, Brian (19 October 2006). "Skeptoid #3: Rods: Flying Absurdities". Skeptoid. Retrieved 22 June 2017. +Famous video of "rods" at the Cave of the Swallows +Detailed video analysis \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8186e29d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Roger Penrose" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:21.027224+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, and philosopher of science. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London. He shared the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". He proposed the Penrose triangle and corresponded with M. C. Escher, influencing his Waterfall and Ascending and Descending. Penrose's eponymous aperiodic tiling presaged the discovery of quasicrystals by Dan Shechtman. +Penrose won the Royal Society Science Books Prize for The Emperor's New Mind (1989), which outlines his views on physics and consciousness. He followed it with The Road to Reality (2004), billed as "A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe". + +== Early life and education == +Born in Colchester, Essex, Roger Penrose is a son of Margaret (née Leathes), a physician, and Lionel Penrose, a psychiatrist and geneticist. His paternal grandparents were J. Doyle Penrose, an Irish-born painter, and the Hon. Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, daughter of Alexander Peckover, 1st Baron Peckover; his maternal grandparents were John Beresford Leathes, a physiologist, and Sonia Marie Natanson, a concert pianist. His uncle was the artist Sir Roland Penrose, whose son with the American photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of the physicist Oliver Penrose, of the geneticist Shirley Hodgson and of the chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Their stepfather was the mathematician and computer scientist Max Newman. He found inspiration in George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins books: "I remember reading (or being read) the Tompkins stories as a quite young child, and I'm sure that their magic was responsible, to a very considerable extent, for the great excitement that fundamental physics has held for me for the rest of my life." +Penrose spent the Second World War as a child in Canada where his father worked in London, Ontario, at the Ontario Hospital and Western University. Penrose studied at University College School. He then attended University College London, where he obtained a BSc degree with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1952. +In 1955, while a doctoral student, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse, after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar in 1951. Having started research under the professor of geometry and astronomy W. V. D. Hodge, Penrose received his PhD in algebraic geometry at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1957, with his thesis titled "Tensor Methods in Algebraic Geometry" supervised by the algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s in collaboration with his father, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form", and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose. + +As the reviewer Manjit Kumar puts it: + +As a student in 1954, Penrose was attending a conference in Amsterdam when by chance he came across an exhibition of Escher's work. Soon he was trying to conjure up impossible figures of his own and discovered the tribar – a triangle that looks like a real, solid three-dimensional object, but isn't. Together with his father, a physicist and mathematician, Penrose went on to design a staircase that simultaneously loops up and down. An article followed and a copy was sent to Escher. Completing a cyclical flow of creativity, the Dutch master of geometrical illusions was inspired to produce his two masterpieces. + +== Research and career == +Penrose spent the academic year 1956–57 as an assistant lecturer at Bedford College (now Royal Holloway, University of London) and was then a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. During that three-year post, he married Joan Isabel Wedge, in 1959. Before the fellowship ended Penrose won a NATO Research Fellowship for 1959–61, first at Princeton University and then at Syracuse University. Returning to the University of London, Penrose spent 1961–1963 as a researcher at King's College, London, before returning to the United States to spend 1963–64 as a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He later held visiting positions at Yeshiva University, Princeton and Cornell University during 1966–67 and 1969. +Dennis Sciama drew his attention from pure mathematics to astrophysics. In 1964, while a reader at Birkbeck College, Penrose, per Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology, "revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime". Until then, work on the curved geometry of general relativity had been confined to configurations with sufficiently high symmetry for Einstein's equations to be solvable explicitly, and there was doubt about whether such cases were typical. One approach to this issue was by the use of perturbation theory, as developed under the leadership of John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. The other, and more radically innovative, approach initiated by Penrose was to overlook the detailed geometrical structure of spacetime and instead concentrate attention just on the topology of the space, or at most its conformal structure, since it is the latter – as determined by the lay of the lightcones – that determines the trajectories of lightlike geodesics, and hence their causal relationships. The importance of Penrose's paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" (summarised roughly as that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form some kind of singularity) was not its only result. It also showed a way to obtain similarly general conclusions in other contexts, notably that of the cosmological Big Bang, which he dealt with in collaboration with Sciama's student Stephen Hawking. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1d546c7ce --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Roger Penrose" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:21.027224+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +It was in the local context of gravitational collapse that the contribution of Penrose was most decisive, starting with his 1969 cosmic censorship conjecture, to the effect that any ensuing singularities would be confined within a well-behaved event horizon surrounding a hidden space-time region for which Wheeler coined the term black hole, leaving a visible exterior region with strong but finite curvature, from which some of the gravitational energy may be extractable by what is known as the Penrose process, while accretion of surrounding matter may release further energy that can account for astrophysical phenomena such as quasars. + +Following up his "weak cosmic censorship hypothesis", Penrose went on, in 1979, to formulate a stronger version called the "strong censorship hypothesis". Together with the Belinski–Khalatnikov–Lifshitz conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in general relativity. Also from 1979 dates Penrose's influential Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the universe and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose and James Terrell independently realised that objects travelling near the speed of light will appear to undergo a peculiar skewing or rotation. This effect has come to be called the Terrell rotation or Penrose–Terrell rotation. + +In 1967 Penrose invented the twistor theory, which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2). +Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. In 1984 such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularising what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams). +In 1983, Penrose was invited to teach at Rice University in Houston, by the then provost Bill Gordon. He worked there from 1983 to 1987. His doctoral students have included, among others, Andrew Hodges, Lane Hughston, Richard Jozsa, Claude LeBrun, John McNamara, Tristan Needham, Tim Poston, Asghar Qadir, and Richard S. Ward. +In 2004 Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page comprehensive guide to the Laws of Physics that includes an explanation of his own theory. The Penrose Interpretation predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference of space-time curvature attains a significant level. +Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished Visiting professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. + +=== An earlier universe === + +In 2010 Penrose reported possible evidence, based on concentric circles found in Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data of the cosmic microwave background sky, of an earlier universe existing before the Big Bang of the present universe. He mentions this evidence in the epilogue of his 2010 book Cycles of Time, a book in which he presents his reasons, to do with Einstein's field equations, the Weyl curvature C, and the Weyl curvature hypothesis (WCH), that the transition at the Big Bang could have been smooth enough for a previous universe to survive it. He made several conjectures about C and the WCH, some of which were subsequently proved by others, and he also popularized his conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) theory. In this theory, Penrose postulates that at the end of the universe all matter is eventually contained within black holes, which subsequently evaporate via Hawking radiation. At this point, everything contained within the universe consists of photons, which "experience" neither time nor space. There is essentially no difference between an infinitely large universe consisting only of photons and an infinitely small universe consisting only of photons. Therefore, a singularity for a Big Bang and an infinitely expanded universe are equivalent. +In simple terms, Penrose believes that the singularity in Einstein's field equation at the Big Bang is only an apparent singularity, similar to the well-known apparent singularity at the event horizon of a black hole. The latter singularity can be removed by a change of coordinate system, and Penrose proposes a different change of coordinate system that will remove the singularity at the big bang. One implication of this is that the major events at the Big Bang can be understood without unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics, and therefore we are not necessarily constrained by the Wheeler–DeWitt equation, which disrupts time. Alternatively, one can use the Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations. + +=== Consciousness === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..adf6f7c16 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +title: "Roger Penrose" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:21.027224+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human (or animal) consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind (1989), he argues that known laws of physics are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness. Penrose proposes the characteristics this new physics may have and specifies the requirements for a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics (what he calls correct quantum gravity). Penrose uses a variant of Turing's halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. (For example, imagine a system with only two states, ON and OFF. If the system's state is ON when a given Turing machine halts and OFF when the Turing machine does not halt, then the system's state is completely determined by the machine; nevertheless, there is no algorithmic way to determine whether the Turing machine stops.) +Penrose believes that such deterministic yet non-algorithmic processes may come into play in the quantum mechanical wave function reduction, and may be harnessed by the brain. He argues that computers today are unable to have intelligence because they are algorithmically deterministic systems. He argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer. This contrasts with supporters of strong artificial intelligence, who contend that thought can be simulated algorithmically. He bases this on claims that consciousness transcends formal logic because factors such as the insolubility of the halting problem and Gödel's incompleteness theorem prevent an algorithmically based system of logic from reproducing such traits of human intelligence as mathematical insight. These claims were originally espoused by the philosopher John Lucas of Merton College, Oxford. +The Penrose–Lucas argument about the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem for computational theories of human intelligence has been criticised by mathematicians, computer scientists and philosophers. Many experts in these fields assert that Penrose's argument fails, though different authors choose different aspects of the argument to attack. Marvin Minsky, a leading proponent of artificial intelligence, was particularly critical, writing that Penrose "tries to show, in chapter after chapter, that human thought cannot be based on any known scientific principle." Minsky's position is exactly the opposite – he believed that humans are, in fact, machines, whose functioning, although complex, is fully explainable by current physics. Minsky maintained that "one can carry that quest [for scientific explanation] too far by only seeking new basic principles instead of attacking the real detail. This is what I see in Penrose's quest for a new basic principle of physics that will account for consciousness." +Penrose responded to criticism of The Emperor's New Mind with his follow-up 1994 book Shadows of the Mind, and in 1997 with The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. In those works, he also combined his observations with those of anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. +Penrose and Hameroff have argued that consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules, which they dubbed Orch-OR (orchestrated objective reduction). Max Tegmark, in a paper in Physical Review E, calculated that the time scale of neuron firing and excitations in microtubules is slower than the decoherence time by a factor of at least 10 billion. The paper's reception is summed up by this statement in Tegmark's support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John A. Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along. 'We're not working with a brain that's near absolute zero. It's reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior'". Tegmark's paper has been widely cited by critics of the Penrose–Hameroff position. +Phillip Tetlow, although himself supportive of Penrose's views, acknowledges that Penrose's ideas about the human thought process are a minority view in scientific circles, citing Minsky's criticisms and quoting the science journalist Charles Seife's description of Penrose as "one of a handful of scientists" who believe that the nature of consciousness suggests a quantum process. +In January 2014 Hameroff and Penrose ventured that a discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan supports the hypothesis of Orch-OR theory. A reviewed and updated version of the theory was published along with critical commentary and debate in the March 2014 issue of Physics of Life Reviews. +He appeared on In Our Time discussing consciousness with Ted Honderich. + +=== Publications === + +His popular publications include: + +The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and The Laws of Physics (1989) +Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994) +The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004) +Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (2010) +Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016) +His co-authored publications include: + +The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking) (1996) +The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking) (1997) +White Mars: The Mind Set Free (with Brian Aldiss) (1999) +His academic books include: + +Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity (1972, ISBN 0-89871-005-7) +Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 1, Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields (with Wolfgang Rindler, 1987) ISBN 0-521-33707-0 (paperback) +Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 2, Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry (with Wolfgang Rindler, 1988) (reprint), ISBN 0-521-34786-6 (paperback) +His forewords to other books include: + +Foreword to "The Map and the Territory: Exploring the foundations of science, thought and reality" by Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria. Published by Springer in "The Frontiers Collection", 2018. +Foreword to Beating the Odds: The Life and Times of E. A. Milne, written by Meg Weston Smith. Published by World Scientific Publishing Co in June 2013. +Foreword to "A Computable Universe" by Hector Zenil. Published by World Scientific Publishing Co in December 2012. +Foreword to Quantum Aspects of Life by Derek Abbott, Paul C. W. Davies, and Arun K. Pati. Published by Imperial College Press in 2008. +Foreword to Fearful Symmetry by Anthony Zee. Published by Princeton University Press in 2007. + +=== Awards and honours === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..43e0400bb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Roger Penrose" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:21.027224+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Penrose has been awarded many prizes for his contributions to science. In 1971 he was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1972. In 1975 Hawking and Penrose were jointly awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1985 he was awarded the Royal Society Royal Medal. Along with Hawking, he was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in Physics by the Wolf Foundation (Israel) in 1988. +In 1989 Penrose was awarded the Dirac Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics. He was also made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics (HonFInstP). In 1990 Penrose was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for outstanding work related to the work of Albert Einstein by the Albert Einstein Society (Switzerland). In 1991, he was awarded the Naylor Prize of the London Mathematical Society. Penrose was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree (DSc) from the University of New Brunswick (Canada) in 1992, and an honorary degree from the University of Surrey in 1993. From 1992 to 1995 he served as President of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. +In 1994 Penrose was knighted for services to science. In the same year, he was also awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) by the University of Bath, and became a member of Polish Academy of Sciences. Penrose was awarded honorary degrees from the University of London in 1995, the University of Glasgow (Doctor of Science, DSc) and University of Essex, both in 1996, from the University of St Andrews in 1997, and the Visva-Bharati University of Santiniketan (India) and Open University (Doctor of the University, DUniv), both in 1998. In 1998 he was elected Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. In 2000 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit (OM). He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Southampton in 2002. +In 2004 Penrose was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and was awarded the De Morgan Medal by the London Mathematical Society for his wide and original contributions to mathematical physics. To quote the citation from the society: + +His deep work on General Relativity has been a major factor in our understanding of black holes. His development of Twistor Theory has produced a beautiful and productive approach to the classical equations of mathematical physics. His tilings of the plane underlie the newly discovered quasi-crystals. +In 2005 Penrose received a Doctorate Honoris Causa (Dr.h.c.) from each the Warsaw University (Poland) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and an honorary Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree from the Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece). In 2005 he was also awarded the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society Dalton Medal. In 2006 he was conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of the University (DUniv) by the University of York and also won the Dirac Medal given by the University of New South Wales (Australia). In 2008 Penrose was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK and one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society. +He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. The same year, he was also awarded the Fonseca Prize by the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). +In 2012 Penrose was awarded the Richard R. Ernst Medal by ETH Zürich (Switzerland) for his contributions to science and strengthening the connection between science and society. In that year he was also awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) by the Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) as well an honorary doctorate degree by the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (Ukraine). +In 2015 Penrose was awarded a Doctorate Honoris Causa (Dr.h.c.) by CINVESTAV (Mexico). In 2017 he was awarded the Commandino Medal at the Urbino University (Italy) for his contributions to the history of science. In that year as well, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree (DSc) by the University of Edinburgh. In 2018 Penrose received an honorary degree from King's College London. +In 2020 Penrose was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, a half-share also going to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy. In the same year, he was also awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science (DSc) by the University of Cambridge. +In 2025 Penrose received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. + +== Personal life == +Penrose's first marriage was to Joan Isabel Penrose (born Wedge), an American he married in 1959. They had three sons. Penrose is now married to Vanessa Thomas, director of Academic Development at Cokethorpe School in Witney, Oxfordshire, and former head of mathematics at Abingdon School. They have one son. + +=== Religious views === +During an interview with BBC Radio 4 on 25 September 2010, Penrose stated, "I'm not a believer myself. I don't believe in established religions of any kind." He regards himself as an agnostic. In the 1991 film A Brief History of Time, he also said, "I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it's not somehow just there by chance ... some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along—it's a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it." +Penrose is a patron of Humanists UK. + +== See also == +List of things named after Roger Penrose \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..97e83a666 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,49 @@ +--- +title: "Roger Penrose" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:21.027224+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Notes == + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Barss, Patchen (2024). The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-1-5416-0366-0. + +== External links == + +Awake in the Universe – Penrose debates how creativity, the most elusive of faculties, has helped us unlock the country of the mind and the mysteries of the cosmos with Bonnie Greer. +Works by or about Roger Penrose at the Internet Archive +Dangerous Knowledge on YouTube – Penrose was one of the principal interviewees in a BBC documentary about the mathematics of infinity directed by David Malone +Penrose's new theory "Aeons Before the Big Bang?": +Original 2005 lecture: "Before the Big Bang? A new perspective on the Weyl curvature hypothesis" Archived 7 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine (Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, 11 November 2005). +Original publication: "Before the Big Bang: an outrageous new perspective and its implications for particle physics". Proceedings of EPAC 2006. Edinburgh. 2759–2762 (cf. also Hill, C.D. & Nurowski, P. (2007) "On Penrose's 'Before the Big Bang' ideas". Ithaca) +Revised 2009 lecture: "Aeons Before the Big Bang?" (Georgia Institute of Technology, Center for Relativistic Astrophysics) +BBC interview on the new theory on YouTube +Roger Penrose on The Forum +Penrose on sidestepping reason on YouTube +Hilary Putnam's review of Penrose's 'Shadows of the Mind' claiming that Penrose's use of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is fallacious Archived 28 November 2007 at the Wayback Machine +Beyond the Doubting of a Shadow: A Reply to Commentaries on Shadows of the Mind at the Wayback Machine (archived 18 June 2008) +Penrose Tiling found in Islamic Architecture +Two theories for the formation of quasicrystals resembling Penrose tilings +Tegmark, Max (2000). "The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes". Physical Review E. 61 (4): 4194–4206. arXiv:quant-ph/9907009. Bibcode:2000PhRvE..61.4194T. doi:10.1103/physreve.61.4194. PMID 11088215. S2CID 17140058. +"Biological feasibility of quantum states in the brain" – (a disputation of Tegmark's result by Hagan, Hameroff, and Tuszyński) +Tegmarks's rejoinder to Hagan et al. +"Toilet Paper Plagiarism" at the Wayback Machine (archived 12 March 2005) – D. Trull about Penrose's lawsuit concerning the use of his Penrose tilings on toilet paper +Roger Penrose: A Knight on the tiles (Plus Magazine) +Penrose's Gifford Lecture biography +Quantum-Mind +Audio: Roger Penrose in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show +Roger Penrose speaking about Hawking's new book on Premier Christian Radio +"The Cyclic Universe – A conversation with Roger Penrose", Ideas Roadshow, 2013 +Forbidden crystal symmetry in mathematics and architecture, filmed event at the Royal Institution, October 2013 +Oxford Mathematics Interviews: "Extra Time: Professor Sir Roger Penrose in conversation with Andrew Hodges." These two films explore the development of Sir Roger Penrose's thought over more than 60 years, ending with his most recent theories and predictions. 51 min and 42 min. (Mathematical Institute) +BBC Radio 4 – The Life Scientific – Roger Penrose on Black Holes – 22 November 2016 Sir Roger Penrose talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his trailblazing work on how black holes form, the problems with quantum physics and his portrayal in films about Stephen Hawking. +The Penrose Institute Website +A chess problem holds the key to human consciousness?, Chessbase +Roger Penrose on Nobelprize.org \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1c3243107 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Rolfing" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:04.854418+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Rolfing () is a form of alternative medicine originally developed by Ida Rolf (1896–1979) as Structural Integration. Rolfing is marketed with unproven claims of various health benefits, is recognized as pseudoscience and is generally characterized as quackery. +It is based on Rolf's ideas about how the human body's "energy field" can benefit when aligned with the Earth's gravitational field. +Rolfing is typically delivered as a series of ten hands-on physical manipulation sessions sometimes called "the recipe". Practitioners combine superficial and deep manual therapy with movement prompts. The process is sometimes painful. The safety of Rolfing has not been confirmed. The principles of Rolfing contradict established medical knowledge, and there is no good evidence that Rolfing is effective for the treatment of any health condition. + +== History == +The practice of Rolfing was developed in the 1940s by Ida Rolf, who held a PhD in biological chemistry from Columbia University. Originally called Structural Integration, Rolf's method was influenced by osteopathic manipulation, yoga, postural training therapies, and the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. +According to Jacobson, she "organized these ideas around her own conviction that the adequacy of the individual's adaptation to gravity... was a key determinant of physical and psychologic health." +Rolf began formally teaching her method in the 1950s at the European College of Osteopathy in Maidstone, England, and later at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where she worked with other figures in the Human Potential Movement. +In 1971, Rolf founded the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration in Boulder, Colorado, to formalize training in her method. By 2010, the Institute had expanded to include multiple training centers worldwide. +In 1990, a group of senior faculty founded the Guild for Structural Integration, a separate teaching organization. Today, multiple schools and professional associations offer training in Structural Integration. The International Association of Structural Integrators (IASI), founded in 2002, maintains certification standards across various schools worldwide. +As of 2025, there are more than 1,950 Rolfers worldwide. + +== The field of Structural Integration == +Since Rolf's death, the field of Structural Integration has branched into various schools. Of these schools, the Rolf Institute is the only one with the use of the trademarked terms "Rolfing" and "Certified Rolfer". Other programs of Structural Integration certify "Practitioners of the Rolf Method of Structural Integration" including the Guild for Structural Integration, Hellerwork Structural Integration, Aston Patterning, SOMA, KMI, and a dozen other Structural Integration programs. A professional membership organization exists called the International Association of Structural Integration, which has certified practitioners by exam since 2007. +In the United States, some states including New Hampshire and Nevada, have a separate license for SI. Internationally, some countries have a Board of Health that regulates bodywork while others don't. Four Canadian provinces require licensure for bodywork practitioners. Switzerland has separate licensure for complementary therapies including Structural Integration. + +== Conceptual basis == +Professor of Complementary Medicine Edzard Ernst has offered this definition: "Rolfing is a system of bodywork invented by Ida Pauline Rolf (1896–1979) employing deep manipulation of the body's soft tissue allegedly to realign and balance the body's myofascial structures." Rolfing is based on the unproven belief that such alignment results in improved movement, breathing, pain reduction, stress reduction, and emotional changes. +Rolf described the body as organized around an axis perpendicular to the earth, pulled downward by gravity, and she believed the function of the body was optimal when it was aligned with that pull. In her view, gravity tends to shorten fascia, leading to disorder of the body's arrangement around its axis and creating imbalance, inefficiency in movement, and pain. Rolfers aim to lengthen the fascia in order to restore the body's arrangement around its axis and facilitate improved movement. Rolf also discussed this in terms of "energy" and said: + +Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravity field, and we so organize the body that the gravity field can reinforce the body's energy field. This is our primary concept. +The manipulation is sometimes referred to as a type of bodywork, or as a type of massage. Some osteopaths were influenced by Rolf, and some of her students became teachers of massage, including one of the founders of myofascial release. +Rolf claimed to have found an association between emotions and the soft tissue: "Rolfing is not primarily a psychotherapeutic approach to the problems of humans, but [...] many people insist on so regarding it. Rolfing is an approach to the personality through the myofascial collagen components of the physical body." She claimed Rolfing could balance the mental and emotional aspects of subjects and that "the amazing psychological changes that appeared in Rolfed individuals were completely unexpected." Rolfers suggest their manipulations can cause the release of painful repressed memories. Rolfers also hold that by manipulating the body they can bring about changes in personality; for example, teaching somebody to walk with confidence will make them a more confident person. The connection between physical structure and psychology has not been proven by scientific studies. + +== Technique == +Rolfing is typically performed in ten sessions, sometimes called "the recipe", which claim to reorganize the body's connective tissues. The first three sessions focus on superficial tissues, the next four focus on deeper tissues and specifically the pelvis, and the final sessions address the whole body. A session typically lasts between 60 and 90 minutes. The recipient wears undergarments and moves between the positions of lying on a table, sitting, and standing. Rolfing treatments can be painful and cause soreness. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0c77fedbc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Rolfing" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolfing" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:04.854418+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Effectiveness and reception == +Because of its dependence on vitalistic concepts and its unevidenced propositions about the connection between physical manipulation and psychology, Rolfing is classified as a pseudoscience, and is generally seen as quackery. +Writing for Science-Based Medicine, lawyer Jann Bellamy writes that in the United States of America the public is inadequately protected from bodywork practices such as Rolfing because of the lack of independent oversight; instead certification is carried out within a "closed loop" system by such bodies as the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork. +In 2015 the Australian Government's Department of Health published a review of 17 alternative therapies, including Rolfing, which concluded no clear evidence of effectiveness was found. Accordingly, in 2017, the Australian government named Rolfing as a practice that would not qualify for insurance subsidy, to ensure the best use of insurance funds. A follow-up systematic review in 2022 confirmed there was no good evidence Rolfing has therapeutic effect and did not recommend a return to insurance subsidy. +Proponents of Rolfing claim it can be used to alleviate pain. However, Rolfing's focus on appropriate "alignment" of structures of the body does not reflect modern science about pain. +The American Cancer Society says the deep soft tissue manipulations such as those used in Rolfing are a concern if practiced on people with cancer near tumor sites. +In 2010 The New York Times reported that Rolfing was enjoying a "resurgence" following an endorsement from Mehmet Oz on The Oprah Winfrey Show. +In 2019 a taxonomy of "internet scams" identified Rolfing as having been used for deceptive claims about alleviating gastrointestinal problems by "restructuring" muscle tissue. + +== See also == +Pierre Bernard (yogi) – an influence on Rolf + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Jones, Tracey A. (2004). "Rolfing". Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Clinics of North America. 15 (4): 799–809, vi. doi:10.1016/j.pmr.2004.03.008. PMID 15458753. +Williams, W. F. (2013). "Rolfing". Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience: From Alien Abductions to Zone Therapy. Routledge. p. 331. ISBN 978-1-135-95522-9. + +== External links == +Rolf Institute website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e1fce574d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Roy G. Neville Prize" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_G._Neville_Prize" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:22.662449+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Roy G. Neville Prize in Bibliography or Biography is a biennial award given by the Science History Institute (formerly the Chemical Heritage Foundation) to recognize a biographical work in the field of chemistry or molecular science. The Roy G. Neville Prize was established in 2006 and named to honor scientist and book collector Roy G. Neville. Neville founded Engineering and Technical Consultants, Redwood City, California, in 1973. He also assembled one of the world's largest collections of rare books in the field of science and technology. The Neville collection, including over 6,000 titles from the late 15th century to the early 20th century, was acquired by the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute) in 2004. + + +== Recipients == +The following people have received the Neville Award: + +2019 Helge Kragh, for Julius Thomsen: A Life in Chemistry and Beyond +2017 John C. Powers, for Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts +2016 Melvyn Usselman, for Pure Intelligence: The Life of William Hyde Wollaston +2013 Mary Jo Nye, for Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science +2011 Michael Hunter, for Boyle: Between God and Science +2009 William Hodson Brock, for William Crookes (1832–1919) and the Commercialization of Science +2007 Michael D. Gordin, for A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table +2006 Robert E. Schofield, for The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Works from 1773 to 1804 + + +== See also == +List of history awards +List of chemistry awards +List of prizes named after people + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS_conspiracy_theory-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS_conspiracy_theory-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3f5fe7671 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS_conspiracy_theory-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "SARS conspiracy theory" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS_conspiracy_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:09.609989+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The SARS conspiracy theory began to emerge during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in China in the spring of 2003, when Sergei Kolesnikov, a Russian scientist and a member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, first publicized his claim that the SARS coronavirus is a synthesis of measles and mumps. According to Kolesnikov, this combination cannot be formed in the natural world and thus the SARS virus must have been produced under laboratory conditions. Another Russian scientist, Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow's epidemiological services, had earlier commented that the SARS virus was probably man-made. +Circumstantial evidence suggests that the SARS virus crossed over to humans from Asian palm civets ("civet cats"), a type of animal that is often killed and eaten in Guangdong, where SARS was first discovered. +Tong Zeng, an activist with no medical background, authored the book The Last Defense Line: Concerns About the Loss of Chinese Genes, published in 2003. In the book, Zeng suggested researchers from the United States may have created SARS as an anti-Chinese bioweapon after taking blood samples in China for a longevity study in the 1990s. The book's hypothesis was a front-page report in the Guangzhou newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. + + +== See also == +Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic + + +== References == + + +== External links == +ParaPundit: Conspiracy theories in China +San Francisco Chronicle's report +SARS Crisis: Don't Rule Out Linkages To China's Biowarfare Article by Richard D. Fisher Jr. for The Jamestown Foundation. +People's Daily's report on Tong Zeng's book (simplified Chinese) +Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao reports the conspiracy theory and Hou's assertion \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael's_line-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael's_line-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..80a2fe289 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael's_line-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: "Saint Michael's line" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Michael's_line" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:06.052873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Sword of Saint Michael, also known as the Sacred Line of Saint Michael or the St Michael-Apollo Axis, is a straight line (a loxodrome or connected series of rhumb-lines) formed by transecting monasteries and churches in Europe and the Holy Land, eight of which are dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Several other notable sites on the same line in Greece are associated with ancient temples to Apollo. +Saint Michael's Line is also the name of a different postulated ley line in England, part of the Mary and Michael Pilgrim's Way. + + +== History == + + +=== Ancient Greece === + +French academic Jean Richer (universitaire) published a book Géographie sacrée du monde grec (Hachette, 1967) which claimed several geographical alignments between ancient Greek temples. One of these was the Kerkyra-Delphi-Athens-Delos axis, intersecting temples at those locations mostly related to Apollo. In 1977, Richer's brother Julian noted that the line, when extended West and East, cross several other cultic locations, calling it the St Michael-Apollo axis. + + +=== Western Europe === +Like many places dedicated to St. Michael, the aligned sites are almost all located on prominent hilltops or other hard to reach places, and include Skellig Michael, St Michael's Mount, Mont Saint-Michel, the Sacra di San Michele, the Church of the Archangel Michael on the Isola Maggiore on the Lake Trasimeno, San Michele Arcangelo, and the Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo. The details of this alignment are also astonishing: the three most important sites, Mont Saint-Michel in France; Sacra di San Michele in Val di Susa and Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo in Gargano, are equidistant from each other. + + +=== Eastern Mediterranean === +The line also transects the Panormitis Monastery of the Archangel Michael on Symi Island, and conventionally terminates at the Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel in Israel. + + +== Coincidence and linearity == +There are a great number of churches and sites devoted to St Michael the Archangel across Europe: see this map. The chances that an arbitrary line would transect multiple of the lesser sites is high. +In a 2016 blog post, astrophysicist Luca Amendola noted that the St Michael-Apollo axis could be characterized as a loxodrome of 60 degrees, which could be calculated using navigation or surveying technology known in antiquity. His private calculations of these rhumb-lines between both Richer's Apollo-cultic sites and the St Michael-cultic sites suggested a strong linearity, with a best-fit at 60.45 degrees: commenting "Compared to the distance from Skellig to Carmel, 4190 km, a deviation of an average 14 km and a maximum of 42 km is indeed astonishing." +For the three major sites on the line, Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo, Gargano, was established around 500AD, and Mont-Saint-Michel was established around 708AD. A pilgrimage route between the two started. Various sources suggest that the Sacra in Piedmont, built in the years around 1000AD, was deliberately sited to be exactly halfway between the other two major sites dedicated to the archangel: as the midpoint on a pilgrimage trail the la Via dell'Angelo (or Via Sancti Michaelis). Other churches en route were dedicated to St Michael, trying to reproduce the success of the Gargano cult tradition and to meet the devotional interests of pilgrims. +For notional end points of the line, the monastery of Skellig Island, established by at least the eighth century, became associated with St Michael by the tenth century. However Mount Carmel and the Stella Maris monastery have no known historic or mythic connection with the archangel. + + +== Legends == +Some of these locations may have had a prior connection to pagan sites of worship, whose cults were re-channeled into Christianized forms. Like Mont Saint-Michel, Sacra di San Michele and the Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo are reported to have been constructed at the behest of St. Michael himself. +According to legend, the Sacred Line of Saint Michael represents the blow the Saint inflicted upon the Devil when he cast him into Hell, as per the story of the Fall of Satan. +A Ukrainian folk legend says that St. Michael gave thunder to the Prophet Elijah on the top of Mount Carmel, so that he could fight the prophets of Baal. + + +== Gallery == + + +== Mary & Michael Pilgrims' Way == +The term St Michael's Line is also used to refer to a similar alignment of hilltop sites connecting significant Pre-Christian and Christian sites following a line across England that is drawn from two parallel (or interwined) lines – the purported Mary and Michael lines, recently promoted as a five week, 350 km pilgrimage walk (see map.) The route starts at St Michael's Mount on the southwest coast and travels east-by-northeast to St Mary's on the opposite coast; Cornwall to Norfolk. Sites along the way include the Boscawen-Un stone circle and the holy well at St Neot. +Sites linked to the archangel within southwest England, include St Michael's Mount, St Michael's Church (Brentor), Creech St Michael, Burrow Mump (also known as St Michael's Borough) and Glastonbury Tor. +This shorter alignment was first postulated in 1969 by John Mitchell and subsequently claimed to be supported by dowsing. As with other ley lines, no scientific evidence indicates that the alignment was planned and meaningful, making the claim pseudoscientific, but commonly reported at these sites. + + +== See also == +Saint Michael the Archangel +Chaplet of Saint Michael +Prayer to Saint Michael + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Mary Michael Pilgrims Way \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..625f58104 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Salutogenesis" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:07.244127+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Salutogenesis is the study of the origins (genesis) of health (salus) and focuses on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis). More specifically, the "salutogenic model" was originally concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping through a study of Holocaust survivors. Despite going through the dramatic tragedy of the Holocaust, some survivors were able to thrive later in life. The discovery that there must be powerful health causing factors led to the development of salutogenesis. The term was coined by Aaron Antonovsky (1923–1994), a professor of medical sociology. The salutogenic question posed by Aaron Antonovsky is, "What makes people healthy?" He observed that stress is ubiquitous, but not all individuals have negative health outcomes in response to stress. Instead, some people achieve health despite their exposure to potentially disabling stress factors. + +Antonovsky identifies the dominant paradigm of Western medicine as pathogenic, which in turn leads to an understanding of health as dichotomous – one is either healthy or sick. For a salutogenic approach, the ease/dis-ease continuum, rather than the health-disease dichotomy is appropriate. Antonovsky identified four criteria to be used in determining a person's position on the continuum: pain, functional limitation, prognostic implication, and action implication; each ranging from “not-at-all” at the ease end to “severe/life-threatening/requiring intervention” at the dis-ease end. Later he wrote: “A continuum model, which sees each of us, at a given point in time, somewhere along a ‘health/dis-ease’ continuum is, I believe, a more powerful and more accurate conception of reality, one which opens the way for a strong theory of health promotion. +In his 1979 book, Health, Stress and Coping, Antonovsky described a variety of influences that led him to the question of how people survive, adapt, and overcome in the face of even the most punishing life-stress experiences. In his 1987 book, Unraveling the Mysteries of Health, he focused more specifically on a study of women and aging; he found that 29% of women who had survived Nazi concentration camps had positive emotional health, compared to 51% of a control group. His insight was that 29% of the survivors were not emotionally impaired by the stress. Antonovsky wrote: "this for me was the dramatic experience that consciously set me on the road to formulating what I came to call the 'salutogenic model." Antonovsky viewed his work as primarily addressed to the fields of health psychology, behavioral medicine, and the sociology of health. However, it has been applied in many different fields such as workplace, nursing, psychiatry, integrative medicine, and healthcare architecture. +The World Health Organization Health Promotion glossary of terms defines Salutogenesis as follows: + +"Salutogenesis describes how social and individual resources help people to manage stress and to thrive. Salutogenesis focuses attention on the study of the origins (genesis) of health (salus) and of positive health outcomes—moving towards the positive end of an ease/dis-ease continuum—in contrast to the more usual study of the origins of disease and risk factors (pathogenesis). Salutogenesis emphasizes the importance of sense of coherence—an individual or collective orientation towards life as being comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. In health promotion, the salutogenic approach focuses on strengthening resources and assets that help people to cope with adversarial life situations, and promote wellbeing and thriving." + +== Salutogenic model of health == + +The Salutogenic Model of Health shows how the interrelationships between stressors and management of tension, generalised and specific resistance resources, life experiences and the sense of coherence (SOC) impact health status. In salutogenic theory, people continually battle with the effects of hardship and stressors. On the other hand, there are generalized resistance resources (GRRs) and specific resistance resources (SRRs), which are all of the resources that help a person cope and are effective in avoiding or combating a range of psychosocial stressors. +Generalized resistance resources enable individuals to make sense of and manage events. Antonovsky argued that over time, in response to positive experiences provided by successful use of different resources, an individual would develop an attitude that was "in itself the essential tool for coping". Examples of GRRs are money, ego-strength, or social support. + +Specific resistance resources support coping “in particular situations of tension.” The relationship between GRRs and SRRs is that via the sense of coherence, GRRs enable one to recognize, pick up and use SRRs in ways that keep tension from turning into debilitating stress, assuming useful SRRs are available. +Generalized resource deficits will cause the coping mechanisms to fail whenever the sense of coherence is not robust to cope with the current situation. This causes illness and possibly even death. However, if the sense of coherence is high, a stressor will not necessarily be harmful. But it is the balance between generalized resource deficits and resources that determines whether a factor will be pathogenic, neutral, or salutary. + +== Sense of coherence (SOC) == +The "sense of coherence" is a theoretical formulation that provides a central explanation for the role of stress in human functioning. Antonovsky defined the sense of coherence as: + +"a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that (1) the stimuli deriving from one's internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable and explicable; (2) the resources are available to one to meet the demands posed by these stimuli; and (3) these demands are challenges, worthy of investment and engagement." +In his formulation, the sense of coherence has three components: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..38a4c78c8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Salutogenesis" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:07.244127+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Comprehensibility: is the cognitive dimension of SOC and may be defined as a belief that things happen in an orderly and predictable fashion and a sense that you can understand events in your life and reasonably predict what will happen in the future. +Manageability: is the behavioural dimension of SOC and may be defined as a belief that you have the skills or ability, the support, the help, or the resources necessary to take care of things, and that things are manageable and within your control. +Meaningfulness: is the motivational dimension of SOC and may be defined as a belief that things in life are interesting and a source of satisfaction, that things are really worthwhile and that there is good reason or purpose to care about what happens. +Although all three components of the SOC are necessary, they are of unequal centrality. Meaningfulness seems the most crucial. Without this motivational component, strong comprehensibility and manageability are likely to be temporary. When a person is committed and caring, however, the way is open to gaining understanding and resources. + +=== Mechanisms shaping SOC: Life experiences === +How does the interaction of life situation, stressors and GRRs contribute to shaping and strengthening the SOC? Antonovsky answers that it is through the pattern of one's life experiences and how they determine the three dimensions of the SOC: “consistent experiences provide the basis for the comprehensibility component; a good load balance, for the manageability component; and, least clear of all, participation in shaping outcome, for the meaningfulness component.” Although chronic resources and chronic stressors (see section on Life situation), lay the foundation for the SOC, Antonovsky also states: “Paradoxically, then, a measure of unpredictable experiences – which call forth hitherto unknown resources – is essential for a strong sense of coherence”. Stressor life events thus strengthen the SOC through “potentiation”, demanding a re-orientation and use of new resources “thereby enriching one’s repertoire.” +Degrees of consistency: Antonovsky explains that humans’ need for stability is formed by consistent experiences. “But without rules, guidelines, criteria for setting priorities; without some significant thread of continuity between past, present and future; without some degree of harmony, we are lost. A strong SOC is linked to perceptions of stable values and rules that can be applied flexibly across situations, and which are constantly examined and developed by incorporating new experiences into the guiding set of rules. +Load balance: “Load experiences are those which make demands upon us to act, to mobilize resources for task performance.” Overload occurs when there are not enough resources to meet demand and underload occurs when “life is so structured that one’s skills, abilities, interests and potential have no channel for expression.” “Much as unused muscles atrophy, so do unused skills, capacities and potentialities.” Again, Antonovsky stresses that this varies across cultural settings. Load balance occurs when we believe we have resources at our disposal to meet the demand. Antonovsky notes that even when the demands are on an individual, the resources may be collectively provided – also described as “in the hands of legitimate others.” +Participation: Antonovsky points out that life experiences that shape meaningfulness are those that we have chosen to take part in, to engage with the problems posed by the experience. “When others decide everything for us – when they set the task, formulate the rules, and manage the outcome – and we have no say in the matter, we are reduced to objects. A world thus experienced as being indifferent to what we do comes to be seen as a world devoid of meaning.” Elsewhere, Antonovsky stresses that it is the ‘taking part’ that is significant (not the deciding or the controlling) and that the activity should be socially valued. + +=== Measurement of the Sense of Coherence === +The Orientation to Life Questionnaire, consisting of 29 items (known as SOC-29), was developed by Antonovsky using a facet theory to measure the sense of coherence. The scale includes items to measure the three components of SOC: comprehensibility (11 items), manageability (10 items), and meaningfulness (8 items). Responses are given on a semantic differential scale from 1 to 7, and after recoding reverse-scored items, they are summed to produce a total score ranging from 29 to 203. A shorter version, SOC-13, provides a total score between 13 and 91 points. +The SOC scales have been translated into over 50 languages and are considered applicable across cultures in assessing one's ability to maintain health despite stress. In addition to SOC-29 and SOC-13, which measure individual sense of coherence, other versions have been developed, such as scales to measure family coherence and an adaptation specifically for children. + +== Collective and setting-specific approaches to Sense of Coherence == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7149bb634 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Salutogenesis" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:07.244127+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Antonovsky on Collective Sense of Coherence === +In his 1987 book Unraveling the Mystery of Health, Antonovsky devotes a section to "The SOC as a group property". He agrees that it is possible to determine the structural properties of a collectivity and even, though more complex, the cultural properties of a group - such as norms and values - but he questions whether a collectivity can be characterised as having a common worldview. One way to determine group SOC might be to aggregate the SOC of individuals in the group or alternatively, to "investigate perceptions by individual members of the group of how the group sees the world". Antonovsky describes his growing discomfort concerning group SOC; the larger, more complex and diverse the collectivity becomes; there needs to be a "sense of group consciousness, of a subjectively identifiable collectivity" before there can be a group SOC. However, when there are collective stressors, "problems confronting the entire collectivity", and even in dealing with some individual stressors, group resources need to be utilised. "In the face of collective stressors, the strength of the group, rather than of the individual, SOC is often decisive in tension management". Later, he expresses difficulties with the concept: "to say that 'the collective thinks, feels, perceives' is, I believe, most problematic." However, elsewhere, he mentions that the SOC construct's "emphasis on resources and flexible coping tactics" is appropriate for application in studying collective stress processes and coping. + +=== Sense of Family Coherence (SOFC) === +Antonovsky and Sourani developed a 26 item scale to measure family sense of coherence (FSOC). Instead of focusing on the family's global orientation to life it focused on the spousal dyad's perception of the family coherence (family life as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful) and how this related to family adaptation in the face of a stressor. Sagy and Antonovsky, in a study on family sense of coherence and the retirement transition, returned to using SOC 29 (i.e. measuring individual SOC) among their measures. They acknowledge that retirement affects not only the person who retires, but also his/her family. Having measured individual SOC, they then considered four models to represent family SOC (FSOC): 1. Aggregation, where FSOC is calculated as the average of the sum of the individual SOCs; 2. Pathogenic, where the FSOC is represented by the weakest member with the lowest individual SOC; 3. Salutogenic, where FSOC is expressed by the SOC of the strongest member and, 4. A consensus model based on the assumption that agreement among family members improves coping. The salutogenic measure of the family was found in that study to be the best predictor of the retiree's health. Later on, Sagy developed a scale of sense of family coherence (SOFC) that examine one's cognitive perception of his or her family, of its worldview, and how it copes with the stresses of life. The scale, an elaborated version of the personal SOC, includes 12 items, was found as a predictor of adjustment to stress situations and mental health among children adolescents and adults. Note: Recently the term “family sense of coherence” has been replaced with “sense of family coherence (SOFC) in line with the terms SOCC and SONC. + +=== Sense of Community Coherence (SOCC) === +The Sense of Community Coherence (SOCC) has been developed as a concept that extends the individual-level Sense of Coherence (SOC) to the community level. It encompasses the perceptions of community comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness, reflecting how members view their community as predictable, supportive, and meaningful. Research has primarily focused on the relationship between SOCC and well-being, mental health, and resilience to stressful events. For example, strong SOCC has been linked to increased resilience during crises and a decrease in unhealthy behaviours among community members. Recent studies have expanded the scope of SOCC to include its impact on intergroup relations, openness towards others, and reconciliation processes. These studies connect SOCC to broader social concepts like social identity, acculturation, conflict studies, and peace processes. They explore how a collective with a strong SOC perceives, feels, or behaves towards others, and whether a strong SOCC is associated with openness or rather with clinging to rigid in-group identities and less openness toward others. +In different social contexts, particularly in conflict situations, SOCC has shown to influence group dynamics significantly. For instance, in religious communities in Israel, a strong SOCC was associated with greater acceptance of in-group narratives and rejection of out-group narratives, leading to a tendency for separation strategies in conflicts. This pattern suggests that while SOCC can be a salutogenic factor in promoting community resilience and mental health, it can also act as a barrier to positive intergroup relationships, particularly in intractable political, ethnic, or religious conflicts. In these situations, community members with a strong SOCC are more likely to adhere to their own collective narratives and reject those of out-groups, potentially perpetuating conflict and hindering reconciliation. +The review of recent literature on SOCC demonstrates its dual role as both a salutogenic factor in fostering community resilience and mental health and as a potential barrier to positive intergroup relations. This complexity highlights the need for nuanced approaches in conflict resolution and community development, taking into account the impact of SOCC on group dynamics and intergroup relations. Understanding and addressing the ways in which strong SOCC contributes to conflict and separation, as well as exploring mediating factors and individual differences, could provide new insights for fostering openness and reconciliation in divided communities. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ba55df274 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Salutogenesis" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:07.244127+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Sense of National Coherence (SONC) === +The concept of Sense of National Coherence (SONC), as introduced by Sagy, is a salutogenic model applied at the national level, reflecting the tendency of a national group to perceive itself as comprehensible, meaningful, and manageable. This concept extends the individual-level 'sense of coherence' (SOC) to a collective dimension, integrating national identity and group experiences into its framework. +SONC applied to understanding how national identity influences individual and collective well-being and attitudes, particularly in conflict situations. This concept has been particularly insightful in conflict studies, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where it's observed that a strong SONC can correlate with reduced openness to opposing narratives and can act as a barrier to reconciliation processes. Research indicates that heightened SONC, particularly in times of conflict or stress, can reinforce national narratives and decrease the willingness to legitimize the perspectives of "out-groups." This tendency has profound implications for conflict resolution and peace building efforts, highlighting the need for strategies that balance national coherence with openness and empathy towards different narratives. The role of SONC is not limited to political conflicts but also extends to social-political situations like pandemics, where it relates to trust in government and mental health outcomes. Understanding SONC can thus offer valuable insights into the interplay between national identity, social cohesion, and conflict dynamics, crucial for formulating effective interventions in divided societies. In essence, SONC is a double-edged sword: it provides psychological security and continuity within a group but can also contribute to intergroup tension and conflict when it becomes overly rigid or exclusive. + +=== Work-related Sense of Coherence (Work-SoC) === +The Ottawa Charter states that health is created and lived by people within their everyday life settings (i.e. where they learn, work, play, love). Based on the Salutogenic Model of Health, this raises the question in how far people experience a sense of coherence not only overall (“Global Orientation to Life”), but also specifically in interaction with these everyday settings. Already Antonovsky believed that the general SOC “can be modified, detrimentally or beneficially, by the nature of the working environment” and described work characteristics that are potentially related to sense of coherence, a workplace where individuals experience meaningfulness, manageability, and comprehensibility. Following this thought, Bauer and Jenny suggested the concept of “Work-related Sense of Coherence” (Work-SoC) defined as the perceived comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningful- ness of an individual's current work situation. Work-SoC is an interactive concept influenced by and influencing both the underlying, general SoC, as well as the perception and handling of work-related demands and resources. The nine-item German Work-SoC scale has been translated into English, Norwegian, Finnish, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, and Czech. Empirically, Work-SoC has been shown to be related to both job-demands-resources and general SoC, as well as to both negative and positive work-related health outcomes. Salutogenics perspectives are also considered in the design of offices. + +== Current developments of the theory and research on Salutogenesis == +Immediately after the early death of Aaron Antonovsky in 1994, his work was primarily adopted and promoted in the Scandinavian countries by Bengt Lindström from the Nordic School of Public Health who had been in close exchange with Antonovsky in the previous years. Since 1996, Bengt Lindström regularly taught courses on health promotion and salutogenesis at the Nordic School and introduced it as a regular topic into the Nordic Health Promotion Research Conferences since. Between 2008 and 2015, he organized international research seminars on Salutogenesis. In 2010, Lindström and Eriksson published The Hitchhiker's Guide to Salutogenesis: Salutogenic Pathways to Health Promotion, currently available in English, Spanish, Catalan, French, Norwegian, Italian, German, and Polish. In 2007, Bengt Lindström together with Maurice Mittelmark initiated the “Global Working Group on Salutogenesis” of the “International Union of Health Promotion and Education” which he chaired until 2017. This group initiated the first and second edition of the Handbook of Salutogenesis published open access by Springer. Both books show key advancements of the field and how Salutogenesis has been applied to diverse settings and topics. +In 2017, Georg Bauer founded the Center of Salutogenesis at the University of Zurich and took over the lead of the Global Working Group. In the same year, the Global Working Group founded the Society for Theory and Research on Salutogenesis STARS, hosted by the Center of Salutogenesis. The Society aims to advance and promote the science of salutogenesis. Together with the Global Working Group, it organizes regular, International Conferences on Salutogenesis. + +== See also == +Social determinants of health – Economic and social conditions that influence differences in health status +Logotherapy – Psychotherapeutic approach +Public health – Promoting health through informed choices +The Peckham Experiment – Social experiment in public health +Pathogenesis – Process by which a disease or disorder develops +Positive psychology – Approach of psychological scientific study + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..20b53e557 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Salutogenesis" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salutogenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:07.244127+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Further reading == +Becker, C. M.; Glascoff, M. A.; Felts, W. M. (2010). "Salutogenesis 30 Years Later: Where do we go from here?" (PDF). International Electronic Journal of Health Education. 13: 25–32. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 5 September 2013. +Studying Health vs. Studying Disease - Aaron Antonovsky. Lecture at the Congress for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, Berlin, 19 February 1990. +Coping with Existential Threats and the Inevitability of Asking for Meaningfulness - Peter Novak. A philosophical perspective +Start making sense - Start Making Sense; Applying a salutogenic model to architectural design for psychiatric care - Jan Golembiewski. A method of applying salutogenic theory. +Salutogenesis +Bengt Lindström, "Salutogenesis – an introduction" +Golembiewski, J. (2012). "Salutogenic design: The neural basis for health promoting environments." World Health Design Scientific Review 5(4): 62–68.https://www.academia.edu/2456916/Salutogenic_design_The_neural_basis_for_health_promoting_environments +Mayer, C.-H. & Krause, C. (Eds.)(2012): Exploring Mental Health: Theoretical and Empirical Discourses on Salutogenesis. Pabst Science Publishers. +Mayer, C.-H. & Hausner, s. (Eds.) (2015): Salutogene Aufstellungen. Beiträge zur Gesundheitsförderung in der systemischen Arbeit. - Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht +Mittelmark, M.B., Sagy, S., Eriksson, M., Bauer, G., Pelikan, J.M., Lindström, B., Espnes, G.A. (Eds.) (2016): The Handbook of Salutogenesis Comprehensive overview of salutogenesis and its contribution to health promotion theory. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6a2018c5b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Sanpaku" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:08.425652+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Sanpaku (三白; lit. 'three whites') or sanpaku gan (三白眼; Chinese: 三白眼; pinyin: Sānbáiyǎn; lit. 'three-white eyes') is a Japanese term referring to a person with visible sclera on three sides of their irises: the normal left and right, plus above or below. The term is most often used in English to refer to a folk belief whereby it functions as an omen or symptom in alternative medicine. It was introduced into English in the mid-1960s by George Ohsawa as a condition supposedly cured by his macrobiotic method. +In manga iconography, sanpaku eyes are used to make a character seem dangerous or threatening. + + +== History == +According to traditional Chinese and Japanese face reading, the eye is composed of two parts, the yin (black, iris and pupil) and the yang (white, sclera). The visibility of the sclera beneath the iris is said to represent physical imbalance in the body, and is claimed to be present in alcoholics, drug addicts, and people who over-consume sugar or grain. Conversely, the visibility of the upper sclera is said to be an indication of mental imbalance in people such as psychotics, murderers, and anyone rageful. In either condition, it is believed that these people attract accidents and violence. +In August 1963, George Ohsawa, an advocate for macrobiotics, predicted that President John F. Kennedy would experience great danger because of his sanpaku condition. +In 1965, Ohsawa, assisted by William Dufty, wrote You Are All Sanpaku, which offers the following perspective on the condition: + +For thousands of years, people of the Far East have been looking into each other's eyes for signs of this dreaded condition. Any sign of sanpaku meant that a man's entire system — physical, physiological and spiritual — was out of balance. He had committed sins against the order of the universe and he was therefore sick, unhappy, insane, what the West has come to call "accident prone". The condition of sanpaku is a warning, a sign from nature, that one's life is threatened by an early and tragic end. +According to Ohsawa, this condition could be treated by a macrobiotic diet emphasizing brown rice and soybeans. + + +== See also == + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Sanpaku - The Skeptic's Dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances_conspiracy_theories-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances_conspiracy_theories-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1547c84f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances_conspiracy_theories-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +title: "Schumann resonances conspiracy theories" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumann_resonances_conspiracy_theories" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:10.750756+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Schumann Resonance conspiracy theories are a family of claims that misrepresent the physics of Schumann resonances - natural, extremely low-frequency electromagnetic resonances of the Earth–ionosphere cavity - as evidence that "time is speeding up," that a 24-hour day now "feels like" or has become ~16 hours, or that fluctuations near ~7.83 Hz directly entrain or transform human biology and consciousness. These narratives spread in New Age, wellness and conspiracy communities from the mid-2010s onward, often citing online spectrograms to claim that "whiteouts" or "blackouts" mark global energetic events. Science writers and fact-checking outlets describe these interpretations as unfounded: Schumann resonances are chiefly driven by lightning and ionospheric conditions, and measured changes in the length of day are milliseconds, not hours. + + +== Background == + +Schumann resonances are global electromagnetic resonances that form because the conductive Earth’s surface and the ionosphere act as a spherical waveguide. Lightning discharges continuously excite standing waves with a fundamental frequency near 7.83 Hz and higher harmonics (approximately 14, 20, 26 Hz, etc.) whose exact values vary with ionospheric conditions and global thunderstorm activity. Since the mid-20th century, researchers have used Schumann resonances to study lightning climatology and ionospheric variability, and similar cavity resonances are modeled for other planets. + + +== Claims and online narratives == +A recurring internet meme asserts that because the Schumann "fundamental" is near 7.83 Hz - the same band as human alpha brainwaves - rises in the resonance "accelerate" human perception so that a 24-hour day now "feels like" 16 hours; the claim is often paired with the false assertion that Earth's rotation is dramatically quickening. Fact-checking has traced this wording in New Age and wellness communities since at least 2016 and judged it false on physical grounds. +Another family of posts reinterprets routine features of spectrograms published by monitoring sites as signs of "energetic" or "spiritual" events. For example, 2025 online discussions on platforms like Medium and Reddit have speculated that spikes or "whiteouts" in lower frequencies indicate the "Earth dreaming" or collective "awakenings," often tied to global events. The Space Observing System at Tomsk State University (Russia) explicitly explains that black vertical bars on its daily spectrograms indicate a lack of data ("no registration of data for some reason"), while bright vertical streaks are typically local lightning impulses, not global "whiteouts". +Wellness and spirituality influencers frequently claim that "tuning" to 7.83 Hz, using commercial "Schumann resonators" or bracelets, yields health or cognitive benefits, and that large "power" values on crowd-shared charts reflect mass awakenings or coordinated meditations. Science communicators and skeptical physicians argue these claims conflate a real geophysical signal with unsupported medical modalities and marketing language about "frequency". A small industry also repackages magnetometer plots from the HeartMath Institute’s Global Coherence Initiative (GCI) to imply causal links between human emotions and the ionosphere; GCI self-describes an aim to study interactions between human consciousness and Earth’s fields, a premise outside mainstream geophysics. Critical commentary by science-skeptic writers has challenged HeartMath/GCI claims as "woo" and methodologically weak; however, such commentary is opinion and not peer-reviewed science. + + +=== Conspiratorial framing and incentives === +Schumann-linked narratives are often cast in a conspiratorial frame common to New Age–adjacent "conspirituality", a hybrid ideology defined by two core convictions: that secretive elites or institutions suppress hidden knowledge, and that humanity is undergoing a consciousness "awakening." Mainstream reporting similarly describes a post-pandemic overlap between wellness influencers and conspiracy communities, noting both ideological and commercial incentives; one account terms the trend "a financial racket." +Within Schumann discourse specifically, creators sometimes interpret missing data on public spectrograms as evidence of "suppression" or insist that "they don’t want you to know" about a transformative planetary frequency claims that fit the conspiracist pattern of concealed truth. Monitoring sites explicitly caution against these readings: Tomsk State University’s guide states that black vertical bars indicate "no registration of data for some reason" (i.e., gaps), not geophysical "blackouts." +BBC’s Sky at Night describes "an entire pseudoscience industry" online built around the resonances, and technology/science writers note the marketing of "Schumann resonators," bracelets and frequency gadgets that promise wellness gains without credible clinical evidence. Articles aimed at general audiences separate the established physics from such "sham medicine," arguing that the claims borrow scientific vocabulary while lacking evidentiary support. + + +== Scientific assessment == + +Peer-reviewed studies quantify how Schumann resonance parameters vary with lightning distributions, season, diurnal cycle and ionospheric state; they are used as a remote-sensing tool, not as a proxy for human physiology or consciousness. Day-to-day and interannual changes in modal intensity and frequency are documented across global networks without any demonstrated link to time perception or health outcomes. Emerging 2025 research has explored potential subtle interactions between Schumann resonances and human biology (e.g., influencing sleep rhythms or heart variability via bioelectricity), but these findings are tentative, debated, and do not support conspiracy claims of consciousness transformation or time acceleration. + + +=== Day length and the "16-hour day" claim === + +High-precision timekeeping with atomic clocks shows that Earth’s rotation yields daily length-of-day fluctuations on the order of milliseconds. In recent records, 29 June 2022 was shorter than 24 hours by about 1.59 ms - far from hours - and such variations arise from geophysical processes, not Schumann resonances. + + +=== Charts, "whiteouts/blackouts," and misinterpretation === +Publicly shared spectrograms can be misread. Tomsk State University’s site explains in Russian and English that black vertical bars simply mean missing data, while bright vertical lines are typically local lightning impulses; the horizontal bands mark the resonant modes themselves. The site also documents routine updates and a 2025 migration to a new address - mundane reasons for data gaps. Mainstream explainers similarly stress that Schumann spectrogram "activity" tracks lightning/ionospheric variability and has no demonstrated bearing on mass consciousness. + + +=== Misattribution to Nikola Tesla === +A persistent myth credits Nikola Tesla with predicting Schumann resonances. Histories of the field note that while Tesla envisioned aspects of global wireless transmission, modern Schumann resonance theory stems from mid-20th-century work by Winfried Otto Schumann and others; scholarship has explicitly addressed the Tesla misattribution. + + +== Commercialization and wellness claims == +Vendors market "Schumann resonance" oscillators, mats and jewelry said to "restore" a 7.83 Hz field or to harmonize users with Earth’s "heartbeat"; technology writers and medical skeptics note these pitches borrow scientific terms without credible clinical evidence, such as FDA approval or randomized trials. Articles aimed at general audiences explicitly separate established physics from this "sham medicine" framing. + + +== Reception == +Mainstream coverage frames Schumann-linked conspiracy narratives as misinterpretations of technical plots and exaggerations of routine variability. Popular explainers separate established physics from mythology and emphasize how spectrograms should be read in context. + + +== See also == +Schumann resonances +Conspiracy theory +Pseudoscience +Electromagnetic radiation and health + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Creative_Intelligence-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Creative_Intelligence-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..21e1a83ec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Creative_Intelligence-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Science of Creative Intelligence" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Creative_Intelligence" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:11.917526+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Science of Creative Intelligence (SCI) was developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as an effort to integrate modern physics, such as unified field theory, with ancient Vedic beliefs and scripture, ultimately proposing that pure consciousness (including creativity and intelligence) underlies the universe and a person can connect to that consciousness through Transcendental Meditation (TM). SCI has been criticized as a pseudoscience. + + +== Overview == + +In 1961, the Maharishi created the "International Meditation Society for the Science of Creative Intelligence" and, in 1971, inaugurated "Maharishi's Year of Science of Creative Intelligence," describing SCI as a link between "modern science with ancient Vedic science." Between 1970-1973, various SCI symposiums were held in places such as Humboldt State University and University of Massachusetts, attended by international scientists. In 1974, the Maharishi created a "World Plan" to spread SCI across the world. + + +=== Education === +SCI has been integrated into the curriculum of various universities across the world, including Maharishi International University (MIU) in Fairfield, Iowa, The Maharishi College of Natural Law in Odisha, India, and the Maharishi Institute of Management with various campuses all across India. For a time, a 33-lesson video course on SCI was available at universities such as Stanford, Yale, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and Oregon State University. In 2010, it was reported that children at the Maharishi School in Lancashire were taught SCI principles. Children in other schools, such as those in Iowa, Maryland, and the United Kingdom were also taught SCI as part of their primary school education. + + +=== Medicine === +SCI also served as the foundation for the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health (MVAH), an ayurvedic alternative medicine founded by the Maharishi during the mid-1980s, based on models and practices of health and disease that conflict with modern medicine and biology. According to MVAH researcher Hari Sharma, their model understands the human body as an abstract pattern of intelligence, drawing from quantum mechanics and Vedic tradition to postulate the existence of "a unified field of pure, non-material intelligence and consciousness whose modes of vibration manifest as the material universe." Tony Nader, as successor to the Maharishi and "maharaja" of the TM movement, has written books detailing astrological influence of the planets upon the human brain and correlations between Vedic literature and human physiology in an overarching attempt to find scientific basis for SCI. This includes using Vedic mantras in efforts to "to enliven the inner intelligence of the body" and heal a person of disease through sound vibration. + + +=== Physics === +Physicist and MIU president John Hagelin proposed that unified field theory is the same as with the Maharishi's "unified field of consciousness", but this postulation was rejected by "virtually every theoretical physicist in the world" in 2006, with academic peers "ostracizing" Hagelin for connecting science with a "form of Hinduism that doesn't acknowledge its roots." Dennis Roark, former chairman of the physics department at MIU, referred to Hagelin's work as "crackpot science". + + +== Criticism == +The Science of Creative Intelligence has been criticized as unscientific in nature. SCI (and TM in general) have been described by scientists, academics, and skeptics as containing pseudoscientific claims, including for its goals of supernatural abilities (such as yogic flying) and for obfuscating its Vedic-Hindu beliefs. SCI has been compared to creationism and characterized as religious in nature, including indoctrination into its metaphysics (including "creative intelligence") and participation in Sanskrit puja rituals invoking Hindu deities. In 1977, a US district court ruled that a TM-based curriculum in SCI that was being taught in New Jersey schools was religious in nature, violating the First Amendment and therefore prohibited. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e28031584 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Science of Survival" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:13.143076+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Science of Survival is a 1951 pseudoscientific book by L. Ron Hubbard which continues to be published by the Church of Scientology as part of Scientology's canon. According to Jon Atack, the title Science of Survival was chosen "to appeal to readers of Korzybski's highly popular Science and Sanity", and Hubbard even acknowledged Korzybski in the book. Its original subtitle was "simplified, faster dianetic techniques", although later editions were subtitled "Prediction of human behavior". +The book set out what Hubbard called the "dynamics of behavior" and provided descriptions of new techniques of Dianetics processing that Hubbard described as being faster and simpler than those that he had advanced previously. In the book, Hubbard introduced two concepts that were later to become key elements of Scientology—theta and the tone scale—and also endorsed the concept of past lives. The book has been criticized for its inhumane suggestions that target some classes of the population. + +== Publication history == +The book was published in August 1951 and dedicated to his daughter Alexis Valerie Hubbard (whom he later disowned). It was dictated on SoundScriber discs in Havana, Cuba, where Hubbard took refuge when his marriage to his second wife Sara Northrup Hubbard broke down. The book Bare-faced Messiah recounts how Hubbard was unable to write and depressed over a custody dispute over Alexis, accusing his wife of "hypnotising him in his sleep and commanding him not to write". +By the time Science of Survival was published, the public popularity of Dianetics had faded and only one Dianetics Foundation was still in existence—the Wichita foundation funded by millionaire Dianeticist Don Purcell. The foundation published the book with the first edition of only 1,250 copies, after which Hubbard blamed Purcell for poor sales of the book. The Church of Scientology has continued to publish the book as a standard reference work of Scientology. + +== Contents == + +=== Theta === +Although Hubbard had not yet established Scientology, which was overtly presented as a religious practice, and continued to maintain that Dianetics was a scientific subject with techniques aimed towards therapeutic results, the information on "theta" in the book clearly begins to move the subject into a religious direction. Hubbard describes theta as a sort of "life energy", and contrasts it with "MEST" – "matter, energy, space and time", the components of the physical universe. He discusses the concept of "entheta", or enturbulated theta, and "enMEST", or enturbulated MEST, as being confused or dysfunctional states of being, and describes how at low levels of the tone scale theta and MEST become overwhelmed by entheta and enMEST before ultimately death occurs and only enMEST remains, whilst as the tone scale is ascended theta and MEST act more and more in accord with each other until MEST is entirely overcome and pure theta is attained. This concept of a spiritual life energy entering and purifying the physical universe recalls the ideas of Gnostic religions. + +=== Tests and results === +As Hubbard tells the story in Science of Survival, in 1950 the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation agreed to a definitive test of claims demanded by the psychological community who wanted Dianetics to validate its claims. The claims to be tested were increased IQ, the relief of psychoses, and the relief of psychosomatic illnesses. +Hubbard said that the tests had been done using psychology's strictest psychometric protocols (Minnesota Multiphasic Test and the Wechsler-Bellevue, "Form B") with examiners Gordon Southon, Peggy Southon and Dalmyra Ibanez, Ph.D., Ed.D. Hubbard also said that their witnessed signatures were affixed to each bank of tests and that all three claims were validated by these tests and these psychometrists. +In January 1951 Hubbard published a booklet by these same alleged doctors: Dianetic Processing – A Brief Survey of Research Projects and Preliminary Results by Dalmyra Ibanez, Ph.D., Ed.D., Gordon Southon, Peggy Southon and Peggy Benton In it, the authors state: + +If dianetic research is to be defined as "the study of human behaviour for the purpose of discovering and removing the sources of aberration", or, in other words, as the study of mental health, a need arises for tools with which to pursue that study. Actually, such tools as do exist may or may not apply to the dynamics of Dianetics, since its methodology has no exact parallel in the history of psychology... For our present studies, therefore, use has been made of those testing instruments judged by a group of psychologists as most appropriate for dianetic purposes. +The names of the persons in this "group of psychologists" are not mentioned. The booklet presents case histories and X-rays and says that it proves that Dianetics can cure "aberrations" including manic depression, asthma, arthritis, colitis and "overt homosexuality." The booklet further says that it used twelve different tests and presents results from five, four of which came from the California Test Bureau and had according to a 1946 investigation of V. E. Ordahl of the University of California no evidence of reliability or validity. +Modern reprintings of Science of Survival (post twentieth printing) no longer contain information about this study or mention the alleged IQ gains of about ten points and other similar alleged gains. The modern version (ISBN 0-88404-418-1) bear a new subtitle: "Prediction of Human Behavior". Earlier editions were subtitled "Simplified, Faster Dianetic Techniques". + +=== Body odor and the tone scale === +In Science of Survival, Hubbard discusses the correlation between body odor, bodily substances, and one's position on the emotional tone scale: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3fb0109de --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Science of Survival" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Survival" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:13.143076+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The body is normally sweet-smelling down to 2.0 but begins to exude chronically certain unpleasant effluvia from 2.0 down. Individuals from 2.0 down commonly have bad breath. Their feet may have a considerable odour. The musk glands are very active. The sweat has a peculiar smell. Sexual organs emit a repelling odour. And various body exhaust functions are not under very good control. The person may have to urinate or defecate under slight stresses or may weep easily for no apparent cause. This column has not been added to this chart because it has not been thoroughly explored but is only known in a general way. Any slightly or greatly repulsive physical odour from an individual does, however, indicate a tone scale position below 2.0. It is amusing to note that in the Orient wives are commonly selected by the sweetness of their perspiration. This is a very reliable test for position on the tone scale. People who have bad breath as they are processed lose it when they are above 2.0 on the tone scale. People who are temporarily suppressed below 2.0 commonly have bad breath. + +== Controversy == +One passage in particular in Chapter 27 of Science of Survival has been singled out for criticism by opponents of Scientology. In it, Hubbard states that + +The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the tone scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered. It is not necessary to produce a world of clears in order to have a reasonable and worthwhile social order; it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line — a task which, indeed, is not very great, since the amount of processing in many cases might be under fifty hours, although it might also in others be in excess of two hundred — or simply quarantining them from the society. A Venezuelan dictator [Juan Vicente Gómez] once decided to stop leprosy. He saw that most lepers in his country were also beggars. By the simple expedient of collecting and destroying all the beggars in Venezuela an end was put to leprosy in that country. +Critics, such as the French Government's Anti-cult interministerial mission, believe that forcibly quarantining all human beings that are classified low on Scientology's tone scale would be a violation of human rights. +Furthermore, the book's claims that "adders are safe bedmates compared to people on the lower bands of the tone scale" and that it is one's "level on the tone scale which gives [him or her] value" have also come under fire. +Hubbard has also been criticized for the strong opposition to abortion, which he displays in the book, in which he says that "America spends [billions] yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for criminals ... primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God." + +== See also == +Bibliography of Scientology +Scientology beliefs and practices + +== References == + +== Bibliography == +Fischer, Harvey Jay: "Dianetic therapy: an experimental evaluation. A statistical analysis of the effect of dianetic therapy as measured by group tests of intelligence, mathematics and personality." Abstract of Ph.D. thesis, 1953, New York University +Fox, Jack et al.: An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics) in Psychological Newsletter, 1959, 10 131-134 [1] +Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory +Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale +Chris Owen, History of the Personality Test + +== External links == +Hubbard, L. Ron (1993). Science of Survival: Prediction of Human Behavior. New Era Publications International ApS. ISBN 9788779897441. OL 6803302M. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-0.md index 0e1e0b599..b11334674 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:40.718071+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:03.462360+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-1.md index 2d7dd923a..3d969fceb 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:40.718071+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:03.462360+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-2.md index 74d220511..48e863790 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_studies" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:40.718071+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:03.462360+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-0.md index 5e32c5534..dbf43dd20 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:13.476539+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:58.466683+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-1.md index 34780154c..942bf2066 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:13.476539+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:58.466683+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-2.md index 7c249fd6a..7cc5a7e08 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:12:13.476539+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:58.466683+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7c096ba87 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 1/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, racial realism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research. +Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology), craniometry, evolutionary biology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which may be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. + +== History == +Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II, and was particularly prominent in European and American academic writings from the mid-19th century through the early-20th century. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been discredited and criticized as obsolete and actively harmful, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. +During the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas and biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben were among the earliest leading critics of scientific racism. Skepticism towards the validity of scientific racism grew during the interwar period, and by the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement, "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes, 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering". Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human races are a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one. +The term scientific racism was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould who used it in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man to describe the historical role of science in propagating the ideal of white racial superiority. Today, the term is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence, that are unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded explicitly as a "race-conscious" journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race. + +== Antecedents == + +=== Enlightenment thinkers === +During the Age of Enlightenment (an era from the 1650s to the 1780s), concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular, though they would only be systematized epistemologically during the 19th century. Monogenism contends that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that each race has a separate origin. Until the 18th century, the words "race" and "species" were interchangeable. + +==== François Bernier ==== +François Bernier (1620–1688) was a French physician and traveller. In 1684, he published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called "races", distinguishing individuals, particularly women, by skin color and a few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des Savants, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled "New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It". +In the essay, he distinguished four different races: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e6cb27b72 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 2/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The first race included populations from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, south-east Asia, and the Americas +The second race consisted of the sub-Saharan Africans +The third race consisted of the east and northeast Asians +The fourth race consisted of Sámi people. +A product of French salon culture, the essay placed an emphasis on different kinds of female beauty. Bernier emphasized that his novel classification was based on his personal experience as a traveler in different parts of the world. Bernier offered a distinction between essential genetic differences and accidental ones that depended on environmental factors. He also suggested that the latter criterion might be relevant to distinguish sub-types. His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted the role of climate and diet in explaining degrees of human diversity. Bernier had been the first to extend the concept of "species of man" to racially classify the entirety of humanity, but he did not establish a cultural hierarchy between the so-called "races" that he had conceived. On the other hand, he clearly placed white Europeans as the norm from which other "races" deviated. +The qualities which he attributed to each race were not strictly Eurocentric, because he thought that peoples of temperate Europe, the Americas, and India—although culturally very different from one another—belonged to roughly the same racial group, and he explained the differences between the civilizations of India (his main area of expertise) and Europe through climate and institutional history. By contrast, he emphasized the biological difference between Europeans and Africans, and made very negative comments towards the Sámi (Lapps) of the coldest climates of Northern Europe, and about Africans living at the Cape of Good Hope. For example, Bernier wrote: "The 'Lappons' compose the 4th race. They are a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don't know how to describe, except that it's long, truly awful, and seems reminiscent of a bear's face. I've only ever seen them twice in Danzig, but according to the portraits I've seen, and from what I've heard from a number of people, they're ugly animals". The significance of Bernier's ideology for the emergence of what Joan-Pau Rubiés called the "modern racial discourse" has been debated, with Siep Stuurman considering it the beginning of modern racial thought, while Rubiés believes it is less significant if Bernier's entire view of humanity is taken into account. + +==== Robert Boyle ==== + +An early scientist who studied race was Robert Boyle (1627–1691), an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle believed in what today is called monogenism, that is, that all races, no matter how diverse, came from the same source: Adam and Eve. He studied reported stories of parents' giving birth to differently coloured albinos, so he concluded that Adam and Eve were originally white, and that whites could give birth to different coloured races. Theories of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton about color and light via optical dispersion in physics were also extended by Robert Boyle into discourses of polygenesis, speculating that perhaps these differences were due to "seminal impressions". However, Boyle's writings mentioned that at his time, for "European Eyes", beauty was not measured so much in colour, but in "stature, comely symmetry of the parts of the body, and good features in the face". Various members of the scientific community rejected his views, and described them as "disturbing" or "amusing". + +==== Richard Bradley ==== +Richard Bradley (1688–1732) was an English naturalist. In his book titled Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (1721), Bradley claimed there to be "five sorts of men" based on their skin colour and other physical characteristics: white Europeans with beards; white men in America without beards (meaning Native Americans); men with copper-coloured skin, small eyes, and straight black hair; Blacks with straight black hair; and Blacks with curly hair. It has been speculated that Bradley's account inspired Linnaeus' later categorisation. + +==== Lord Kames ==== + +The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was a polygenist; he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his 1734 book Sketches on the History of Man, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks. + +==== Carl Linnaeus ==== + +Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified the established taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and also made a classification of humans into different subgroups. In the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae (1767), he labeled five "varieties" of human species. +Each one was described as possessing the following physiognomic characteristics "varying by culture and place": \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-10.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-10.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7031f15b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-10.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 11/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Early intelligence testing and the Immigration Act of 1924 === +Before the 1920s, social scientists agreed that whites were superior to blacks, but they needed a way to prove this to back social policy in favor of whites. They felt the best way to gauge this was through testing intelligence. By interpreting the tests to show favor to whites these test makers' research results portrayed all minority groups very negatively. In 1908, Henry Goddard translated the Binet intelligence test from French and in 1912 began to apply the test to incoming immigrants on Ellis Island. A 1981 study claims that in a study of immigrants Goddard reached the conclusion that 87% of Russians, 83% of Jews, 80% of Hungarians, and 79% of Italians were feeble-minded and had a mental age less than 12. Some have also claimed that this information was taken as "evidence" by lawmakers and thus it affected social policy for years. Bernard Davis has pointed out that, in the first sentence of his paper, Goddard wrote that the subjects of the study were not typical members of their groups but were selected because of their suspected sub-normal intelligence. Davis has further noted that Goddard argued that the low IQs of the test subjects were more likely due to environmental rather than genetic factors, and that Goddard concluded that "we may be confident that their children will be of average intelligence and if rightly brought up will be good citizens". In 1996 the American Psychological Association's Board of Scientific Affairs stated that IQ tests were not discriminatory towards any ethnic/racial groups. +In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould argued that intelligence testing results played a major role in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted immigration to the United States. However, Mark Snyderman and Richard J. Herrnstein, after studying the Congressional Record and committee hearings related to the Immigration Act, concluded "the [intelligence] testing community did not generally view its findings as favoring restrictive immigration policies like those in the 1924 Act, and Congress took virtually no notice of intelligence testing". +Juan N. Franco contested the findings of Snyderman and Herrnstein. Franco stated that even though Snyderman and Herrnstein reported that the data collected from the results of the intelligence tests were in no way used to pass The Immigration Act of 1924, the IQ test results were still taken into consideration by legislators. As suggestive evidence, Franco pointed to the following fact: Following the passage of the immigration act, information from the 1890 census was used to set quotas based on percentages of immigrants coming from different countries. Based on these data, the legislature restricted the entrance of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe into the United States and allowed more immigrants from northern and Western Europe into the country. The use of the 1900, 1910 or 1920 census data sets would have resulted in larger numbers of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe being allowed into the U.S. However, Franco pointed out that using the 1890 census data allowed congress to exclude southern and eastern Europeans (who performed worse on IQ tests of the time than did western and northern Europeans) from the U.S. Franco argued that the work Snyderman and Herrnstein conducted on this matter neither proved or disproved that intelligence testing influenced immigration laws. + +=== Sweden === + +Following the creation of the first society for the promotion of racial hygiene, the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905—a Swedish society was founded in 1909 as the Svenska sällskapet för rashygien, the third in the world. By lobbying Swedish parliamentarians and medical institutes the society managed to pass a decree creating a government-run institute in the form of the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology in 1921. By 1922 the institute was built and opened in Uppsala. It was the first such government-funded institute in the world performing research into "racial biology" and remains highly controversial to this day. It was the most prominent institution for the study of "racial science" in Sweden. The goal was to cure criminality, alcoholism and psychiatric problems through research in eugenics and racial hygiene. As a result of the institute's work, a law permitting compulsory sterilization of certain groups was enacted in Sweden in 1934. The second president of the institute Gunnar Dahlberg was highly critical of the validity of the science performed at the institute and reshaped the institute toward a focus on genetics. In 1958 it closed down and all remaining research was moved to the Department of Medical Genetics at Uppsala University. + +=== Nazi Germany === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-11.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-11.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..acb524165 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-11.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 12/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Nazi Party and its sympathizers published many books on scientific racism, seizing on the eugenicist and antisemitic ideas with which they were widely associated, although these ideas had been in circulation since the 19th century. Books such as Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Racial Science of the German People") by Hans Günther (first published in 1922) and Rasse und Seele ("Race and Soul") by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß (published under different titles between 1926 and 1934) attempted to scientifically identify differences between the German, Nordic, or Aryan people and other, supposedly inferior, groups. German schools used these books as texts during the Nazi era. In the early 1930s, the Nazis used racialized scientific rhetoric based on social Darwinism to push its restrictive and discriminatory social policies. +During World War II, Nazi racialist beliefs became anathema in the United States, and Boasians such as Ruth Benedict consolidated their institutional power. After the war, discovery of the Holocaust and Nazi abuses of scientific research (such as Josef Mengele's ethical violations and other war crimes revealed at the Nuremberg Trials) led most of the scientific community to repudiate scientific support for racism. +Propaganda for the Nazi eugenics program began with propaganda for eugenic sterilization. Articles in Neues Volk described the appearance of the mentally ill and the importance of preventing such births. Photographs of mentally incapacitated children were juxtaposed with those of healthy children. The film Das Erbe showed conflict in nature in order to legitimize the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring by sterilization. +Although the child was "the most important treasure of the people", this did not apply to all children, even German ones, only to those with no hereditary weaknesses. Nazi Germany's racially based social policies placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of Nazi ideology. People targeted by this policy included criminals, "degenerates", "dissidents" who opposed the Nazification of Germany, the "feeble minded", Jewish people, homosexuals, the insane, idle and "weak". As they were seen as people who fit the criteria of "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), they should thus not be allowed to procreate and pass on their genes or heritage. Although they were still regarded as "Aryan", Nazi ideology deemed Slavs (i.e., Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) to be racially inferior to the Germanic master race, suitable for expulsion, enslavement, or even extermination. +Adolf Hitler banned intelligence quotient (IQ) testing for being "Jewish". + +=== United States === + +In the 20th century, concepts of scientific racism, which sought to prove the physical and mental inadequacy of groups deemed "inferior", was relied upon to justify involuntary sterilization programs. Such programs, promoted by eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, were upheld as constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). In all, between 60,000 and 90,000 Americans were subjected to involuntary sterilization. +Scientific racism was also used as a justification for the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson–Reed Act), which imposed racial quotas limiting Italian American immigration to the United States and immigration from other southern European and eastern European nations. Proponents of these quotas, who sought to block "undesirable" immigrants, justifying restrictions by invoking scientific racism. +Lothrop Stoddard published many racialist books on what he saw as the peril of immigration, his most famous being The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In this book he presented a view of the world situation pertaining to race focusing concern on the coming population explosion among the "colored" peoples of the world and the way in which "white world-supremacy" was being lessened in the wake of World War I and the collapse of colonialism. +Stoddard's analysis divided world politics and situations into "white", "yellow", "black", "Amerindian", and "brown" peoples and their interactions. Stoddard argued race and heredity were the guiding factors of history and civilization, and that the elimination or absorption of the "white" race by "colored" races would result in the destruction of Western civilization. Like Madison Grant, Stoddard divided the white race into three main divisions: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. He considered all three to be of good stock, and far above the quality of the colored races, but argued that the Nordic was the greatest of the three and needed to be preserved by way of eugenics. Unlike Grant, Stoddard was less concerned with which varieties of European people were superior to others (Nordic theory), but was more concerned with what he called "bi-racialism", seeing the world as being composed of simply "colored" and "white" races. In the years after the Great Migration and World War I, Grant's racial theory would fall out of favor in the U.S. in favor of a model closer to Stoddard's. +An influential publication was The Races of Europe (1939) by Carleton S. Coon, president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists from 1930 to 1961. Coon was a proponent of multiregional origin of modern humans. He divided Homo sapiens into five main races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid (including Native Americans), Australoid, Congoid, and Capoid. +Coon's school of thought was the object of increasing opposition in mainstream anthropology after World War II. Ashley Montagu was particularly vocal in denouncing Coon, especially in his Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. By the 1960s, Coon's approach had been rendered obsolete in mainstream anthropology, but his system continued to appear in publications by his student John Lawrence Angel as late as in the 1970s. +In the late 19th century, the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) United States Supreme Court decision—which upheld the constitutional legality of racial segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal"—was intellectually rooted in the racism of the era, as was the popular support for the decision. Later, in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) decision rejected racialist arguments about the "need" for racial segregation—especially in public schools. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-12.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-12.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ddd8490ce --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-12.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 13/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== After 1945 == +By 1954, 58 years after the Plessy v. Ferguson upholding of racial segregation in the United States, American popular and scholarly opinions of scientific racism and its sociologic practice had evolved. +In 1960, the journal Mankind Quarterly was founded, which is commonly described as a venue for scientific racism and white supremacy, and as lacking a legitimate scholarly purpose. The journal was founded in 1960, partly in response to the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education which desegregated the American public school system. +In April 1966, Alex Haley interviewed American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy. Rockwell justified his belief that blacks were inferior to whites by citing a long-discredited 1916 study by G. O. Ferguson which claimed to show that the intellectual performance of black students was correlated with their percentage of white ancestry, stating "pure negroes, negroes three-fourths pure, mulattoes and quadroons have, roughly, 60, 70, 80 and 90 percent, respectively, of white intellectual efficiency". Playboy later published the interview with an editorial note claiming the study was a "discredited ... pseudoscientific rationale for racism". +International bodies such as UNESCO attempted to draft resolutions that would summarize the state of scientific knowledge about race and issued calls for the resolution of racial conflicts. In its 1950 "The Race Question", UNESCO did not reject the idea of a biological basis to racial categories, but instead defined a race as: "A race, from the biological standpoint, may therefore be defined as one of the group of populations constituting the species Homo sapiens", which were broadly defined as the Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid races but stated that "It is now generally recognized that intelligence tests do not in themselves enable us to differentiate safely between what is due to innate capacity and what is the result of environmental influences, training and education". +Despite scientific racism being largely dismissed by the scientific community after World War II, some researchers have continued to propose theories of racial superiority in the past few decades. These authors themselves, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term racism and may prefer terms such as "race realism" or "racialism". In 2018, British science journalist and author Angela Saini expressed strong concern about the return of these ideas into the mainstream. Saini followed up on this idea with her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science. +One such post-World War II scientific racism researcher is Arthur Jensen. His most prominent work is The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability in which he supports the theory that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites. Jensen argues for differentiation in education based on race, stating that educators must "take full account of all the facts of [students'] nature". Responses to Jensen criticized his lack of emphasis on environmental factors. Psychologist Sandra Scarr describes Jensen's work as "conjur[ing] up images of blacks doomed to failure by their own inadequacies". +J. Philippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund (Race, Evolution, and Behavior) and a defender of Jensen's The g Factor, also has multiple publications perpetuating scientific racism. Rushton argues "race differences in brain size likely underlie their multifarious life history outcomes". Rushton's theories are defended by other scientific racists such as Glayde Whitney. Whitney published works suggesting higher crime rates among people of African descent can be partially attributed to genetics. Whitney draws this conclusion from data showing higher crime rates among people of African descent across different regions. Other researchers point out that proponents of a genetic crime-race link are ignoring confounding social and economic variables, drawing conclusions from correlations. +Christopher Brand was a proponent of Arthur Jensen's work on racial intelligence differences. Brand's The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications claims black people are intellectually inferior to whites. He argues the best way to combat IQ disparities is to encourage low-IQ women to reproduce with high-IQ men. He faced intense public backlash, with his work being described as a promotion of eugenics. Brand's book was withdrawn by the publisher and he was dismissed from his position at the University of Edinburgh. +Other prominent modern proponents of scientific racism include Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve). +Kevin MacDonald, in his Culture of Critique series, used arguments from evolutionary psychology to promote antisemitic theories that Jews as a group have biologically evolved to be highly ethnocentric and hostile to the interests of white people. He asserts Jewish behavior and culture are central causes of antisemitism, and promotes conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish control and influence in government policy and political movements. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-13.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-13.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0326ec4ba --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-13.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 14/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Psychologist Richard Lynn has published multiple papers and a book supporting theories of scientific racism. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn claims that national GDP is determined largely by national average IQ. He draws this conclusion from the correlation between average IQ and GDP and argues low intelligence in African nations is the cause of their low levels of growth. Lynn's theory has been criticized for attributing causal relationship between correlated statistics. Lynn supports scientific racism more directly in his 2002 paper "Skin Color and Intelligence in African Americans", where he proposes "the level of intelligence in African Americans is significantly determined by the proportion of Caucasian genes". As with IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn's methodology is flawed, and he purports a causal relationship from what is simply correlation. +Nicholas Wade's book (A Troublesome Inheritance) faced strong backlash from the scientific community, with 142 geneticists and biologists signing a letter describing Wade's work as "misappropriation of research from our field to support arguments about differences among human societies". +On June 17, 2020, Elsevier announced it was retracting an article that J. Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer had published in 2012 in the Elsevier journal Personality and Individual Differences. The article falsely claimed that there was scientific evidence that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans. +The Jena Declaration, published by the German Zoological Society, rejects the idea of human races and distances itself from the racial theories of 20th century scientists. It states that genetic variation between human populations is smaller than within them, demonstrating that the biological concept of "races" is invalid. The statement highlights that there are no specific genes or genetic markers that match with conventional racial categorizations. It also indicates that the idea of "races" is based on racism rather than any scientific factuality. +In the United States, an executive order issued March 27, 2025, by the White House characterized an exhibit on African American art at the Smithsonian Institution as divisive, due in part to its presenting race as not being "a biological reality". Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., however, had commented a year earlier that although racial categories are indeed culturally constructed, the degree of genetic diversity of each individual on the planet actually unifies humanity in that "we are all mixed". +Clarence Gravlee has written that disparities in the incidence of such medical conditions as diabetes, stroke, cancer, and low birth weight should be viewed with a societal lens. He has argued that social inequalities, not genetic differences between races, are the reason for these differences. Gravlee has also maintained +that genetic differences between different population groups are based on climate and geography, not race, and he calls for replacing incorrect biological explanations of racial disparities with an analysis of the social conditions that lead to disparate medical outcomes. In his book Is Science Racist, Jonathan Marks similarly asserts that races exist, though they lack a natural categorization in the realm of biology. Cultural rules such as the "one-drop rule" must be devised to establish categories of race, even if they go against the natural patterns within our species. According to Marks' writing, racist ideas propagated by scientists are what make science racist. +In her book Medical Apartheid Harriet Washington describes the abuse of Black people in medical research and experimentation. Black people were tricked into participating in medical experiments through the use of unclear language on consent forms and a failure to list the risks and side effects of the treatment. Washington mentions that, because Black people were denied adequate health care, they were often desperate for medical help, and medical experimenters were able to exploit that need. Washington also emphasizes that when treatments were perfected and refined as a result of those experiments, Black people almost never benefited from the treatments. +A 2018 statement by the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) expressed alarm at the "resurgence of groups rejecting the value of genetic diversity and using discredited or distorted genetic concepts to bolster bogus claims of white supremacy". The ASHG denounced this as a "misuse of genetics to feed racist ideologies", and highlighted several factual errors upon which white supremacist claims have been based. The statement affirms that genetics "demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories" and that it "exposes the concept of racial purity as scientifically meaningless". +On 24 January 2026, the New York Times reported that a group of fringe researchers with a long history of racist pseudoscience had used deception to access protected NIH data. The group, which included Bryan Pesta, Jordan Lasker, John G. R. Fuerst, and Emil Kirkegaard and was funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, used the data "to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart. Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor.” These papers sparked a new wave of online disinformation about race and intelligence. Pesta, the only one of the group to hold a university position, was fired from Cleveland State University because of this scientific misconduct. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== Bibliography == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-14.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-14.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..67aae1ba3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-14.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 15/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Further reading == +Alexander, Nathan G. (2019). Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914. New York/Manchester: New York University Press/Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-1526142375. +Ball, Philip (June 9, 2021). "The unwelcome revival of 'race science': 20 years after the human genome was first sequenced, dangerous gene myths abound". The Guardian. +Condit, Celeste M. (2010). Rhetorical Engagements in the Scientist's Process of Remaking Race as Genetic. The University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1299241091. +Fredrickson, George M. (2002). Racism: A Short History. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00899-8. +Scientific racism, history of at Encyclopedia.com (Cengage) +Gardner, Dan. "Race Science: When Racial Categories Make No Sense". The Globe and Mail, October 27, 1995. +"Race, Evolution and the Science of Human Origins" by Allison Hopper, Scientific American (July 5, 2021). +Purves D; Augustine GJ; Fitzpatrick D; et al., eds. (2001). "Box D. Brain Size and Intelligence". Neuroscience (2nd ed.). Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates. +Redman, Samuel J. (2016). Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674660410. +Saini, Angela (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0008341008. +Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. University of Vermont Press. ISBN 978-1584657156. + +== External links == + +Fact Sheet on Eugenics and Scientific Racism from the National Human Genome Research Institute +The Mis-portrayal of Darwin as a Racist – Refutes claims that Darwin was a racist or that his views inspired the Nazis +Reviews of Race: The Reality of Human Differences +RaceSci: History of Race in Science (Archived February 11, 2021, at the Wayback Machine) +Institute for the study of academic racism (ISAR) (Archived January 17, 2022, at the Wayback Machine) +"Race, Science, and Social Policy". Race: The Power of an Illusion. PBS. +"How Can We Curb the Spread of Scientific Racism?"—A review of Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini +Timeline of Scientific Racism Archived April 6, 2022, at the Wayback Machine—The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..01434c8a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 3/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Americanus: red, choleric, upright; black, straight, thick hair; nostrils flared; face freckled; beardless chin; stubborn, zealous, free; painting themself with red lines; governed by habit. +The Europeanus: white, sanguine, muscular; with yellowish, long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute, inventive; covered with close vestments; governed by customs. +The Asiaticus: yellow, melancholic, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; austere, haughty, greedy; covered with loose clothing; governed by beliefs. +The Afer or Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females with elongated labia; mammary glands give milk abundantly; sly, lazy, negligent; anoints themself with grease; governed by caprice. +The Monstrosus were mythologic humans which did not appear in the first editions of Systema Naturae. The sub-species included: the "four-footed, mute, hairy" Homo feralis (Feral man); the animal-reared Juvenis lupinus hessensis (Hessian wolf boy); the Juvenis hannoveranus (Hannoverian boy); the Puella campanica (Wild-girl of Champagne); the agile, but faint-hearted Homo monstrosus (Monstrous man); the Patagonian giant; the Dwarf of the Alps; and the monorchid Khoikhoi (Hottentot). In Amoenitates academicae (1763), Linnaeus presented the mythologic Homo anthropomorpha (Anthropomorphic man), or humanoid creatures, such as the troglodyte, the satyr, the hydra, and the phoenix, incorrectly identified as simian creatures. +There are disagreements about the basis for Linnaeus' human taxa. On the one hand, his harshest critics say the classification was not only ethnocentric, but seemed to be based upon skin colour. Renato G. Mazzolini argued that classifications based on skin colour, at its core, were a white/black polarity, and that Linnaeus' thinking became paradigmatic for later racist beliefs. On the other hand, Quintyn (2010) points out that some authors believed that Linnaeus' classification was based upon geographical distribution, being cartographically-based, and not hierarchical. In the opinion of Kenneth A. R. Kennedy (1976), Linnaeus certainly considered his own culture as superior, but his motives for the classification of human varieties were not race-centered. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1994) argued that the taxa was "not in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition", and that Linnaeus' division was influenced by the medical theory of humors, which said that a person's temperament may be related to biological fluids. In a 1994 essay, Gould added: "I don't mean to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs about the superiority of his own European variety over others... nevertheless, and despite these implications, the overt geometry of Linnaeus' model is not linear or hierarchical". +In a 2008 essay published by the Linnean Society of London, Marie-Christine Skuncke interpreted Linnaeus' statements as reflecting a view that "Europeans' superiority resides in "culture", and that the decisive factor in Linnaeus' taxa was "culture", not race". Thus, regarding this topic, Skuncke considers Linnaeus' view as merely "eurocentric", arguing that Linnaeus never called for racist action, and did not use the word "race", which was only introduced later "by his French opponent, Buffon". However, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race, points out that Buffon, indeed "the enemy of all rigid classifications", was diametrically opposed to such broad categories, and did not use the word "race" to describe them. "It was quite clear, after reading Buffon, that he uses the word in no narrowly defined, but rather in a general sense", wrote Montagu, pointing out that Buffon did employ the French word la race, but as a collective term for whatever population he happened to be discussing at the time; for instance: "The Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite Laplanders, the inhabitants of Nova-Zembla, the Borandians, the Samoiedes, the Ostiacks of the old continent, the Greenlanders, and the savages to the north of the Esquimaux Indians, of the new continent, appear to be of one common race". + +Scholar Stanley A. Rice agrees that Linnaeus' classification was not meant to "imply a hierarchy of humanness or superiority"; however, modern critics regard Linnaeus' classification as obviously stereotyped and erroneous for having included anthropological, non-biological features, such as customs or traditions. + +==== Charles White ==== +Charles White (1728–1813), an English physician and surgeon, believed that races occupied different stations in the "Great Chain of Being", and he tried to scientifically prove that human races had distinct origins from each other. He speculated that whites and Negroes were two different species. White was a believer in polygeny, the idea that different races had been created separately. His Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by rebutting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's interfertility argument, which said that only the same species can interbreed. White pointed to species hybrids, such as foxes, wolves, and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed. For White, each race was a separate species, divinely created for its own geographical region. + +==== Buffon and Blumenbach ==== \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b16100cbc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 4/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) were proponents of monogenism, the concept that all races have a single origin. Buffon and Blumenbach believed a "degeneration theory" of the origins of racial difference. Both asserted that Adam and Eve were white, and that other races came about by degeneration owing to environmental factors, such as climate, disease, and diet. According to this model, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the heat of the tropical sun; that cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos; and that the Chinese had fairer skins than the Tartars, because the former kept mostly in towns, and were protected from environmental factors. Environmental factors, poverty, and hybridization could make races "degenerate", and differentiate them from the original white race by a process of "raciation". Interestingly, both Buffon and Blumenbach believed that the degeneration could be reversed if proper environmental control was taken, and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original white race. +According to Blumenbach, there are five races, all belonging to a single species: Caucasian, Mongolian, Negroid, American, and the Malay race. Blumenbach stated: "I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian for the reasons given below, which make me esteem it the primeval one". +Before James Hutton and the emergence of scientific geology, many believed the Earth was only 6,000 years old. Buffon had conducted experiments with heated balls of iron, which he believed were a model for the Earth's core, and concluded that the Earth was 75,000 years old, but did not extend the time since Adam and the origin of humanity back more than 8,000 years—not much further than the 6,000 years of the prevailing Ussher chronology subscribed to by most of the monogenists. Opponents of monogenism believed that it would have been difficult for races to change markedly in such a short period of time. + +==== Benjamin Rush ==== +Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a Founding Father of the United States and a physician, proposed that being black was a hereditary skin disease, which he called "negroidism", and that it could be cured. Rush believed non-whites were actually white underneath, but that they were stricken with a non-contagious form of leprosy, which darkened their skin color. Rush drew the conclusion that "whites should not tyrannize over [blacks], for their disease should entitle them to a double portion of humanity. However, by the same token, whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the 'disorder'... attempts must be made to cure the disease". + +==== Christoph Meiners ==== + +Christoph Meiners (1747–1810) was a German polygenist, and believed that each race had a separate origin. Meiners studied the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of each race, and built a race hierarchy based on his findings. Meiners split mankind into two divisions, which he labelled the "beautiful white race" and the "ugly black race". In his book titled The Outline of History of Mankind, Meiners argued that a main characteristic of race is either beauty or ugliness. Meiners thought only the white race to be beautiful, and considered ugly races to be inferior, immoral, and animal-like. Meiners wrote about how the dark, ugly peoples were differentiated from the white, beautiful peoples by their "sad" lack of virtue and their "terrible vices". +Meiners hypothesized about how the Negro felt less pain than any other race, and lacked in emotions. Meiners wrote that the Negro had thick nerves, and thus, was not sensitive like the other races. He went so far as to say that the Negro possessed "no human, barely any animal, feeling". Meiners described a story where a Negro was condemned to death by being burned alive. Halfway through the burning, the Negro asked to smoke a pipe, and smoked it like nothing was happening while he continued to be burned alive. Meiners studied the anatomy of the Negro, and came to the conclusion that Negroes were all carnivores, based upon his observations that Negroes had bigger teeth and jaws than any other race. Meiners claimed the skull of the Negro was larger, but the brain of the Negro was smaller than any other race. Meiners theorized that the Negro was the most unhealthy race on Earth because of its poor diet, mode of living, and lack of morals. +Meiners studied the diet of the Americans, and said they fed off any kind of "foul offal", and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. He believed their skulls were so thick that the blades of Spanish swords shattered on them. Meiners also claimed the skin of an American is thicker than that of an ox. +Meiners wrote that the noblest race was the Celts. This was based upon assertions that they were able to conquer various parts of the world, they were more sensitive to heat and cold, and their delicacy is shown by the way they are selective about what they eat. Meiners claimed that Slavs are an inferior race, "less sensitive and content with eating rough food". He described stories of Slavs allegedly eating poisonous fungi without coming to any harm. He claimed that their medical techniques were also counterproductive; as an example, Meiners described their practice of warming up sick people in ovens, then making them roll in the snow. + +=== Later thinkers === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..772292373 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 5/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Thomas Jefferson ==== +Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was an American politician, scientist, and slave owner. His contributions to scientific racism have been noted by many historians, scientists, and scholars. According to an article published in the McGill Journal of Medicine: "One of the most influential pre-Darwinian racial theorists, Jefferson's call for science to determine the obvious 'inferiority' of African Americans is an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism". Writing for The New York Times, historian Paul Finkelman described how as "a scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come 'from the color of the blood,' and concluded that blacks were 'inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind'". In his "Notes on the State of Virginia", Jefferson described black people as follows: + +They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labor through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But, this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection... Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory, they are equal to the whites; in reason, much inferior, as I think one [black] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous... I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. +However, by 1791, Jefferson had to reassess his earlier suspicions of whether blacks were capable of intelligence when he was presented with a letter and almanac from Benjamin Banneker, an educated black mathematician. Delighted to have discovered scientific proof for the existence of black intelligence, Jefferson wrote to Banneker: + +No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. + +==== Samuel Stanhope Smith ==== +Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751–1819) was an American Presbyterian minister and author of the Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). Smith claimed that Negro pigmentation was nothing more than a huge freckle that covered the whole body as a result of an oversupply of bile, which was caused by tropical climates. + +==== Georges Cuvier ==== + +Racial studies by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the French naturalist and zoologist, influenced both scientific polygenism and scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations. Cuvier wrote about Caucasians: "The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong, and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage, and activity". +Regarding Negroes, Cuvier wrote: + +The Negro race ... is marked by black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium, and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism. +He thought Adam and Eve were Caucasian, and hence, the original race of mankind. The other two races arose by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth approximately 5,000 years ago. Cuvier theorized that the survivors lived in complete isolation from each other, and developed separately as a result. +One of Cuvier's pupils, Friedrich Tiedemann, was among the first to make a scientific contestation of racism. Tiedemann asserted that based upon his documentation of craniometric and brain measurements of Europeans and black people from different parts of the world, that the then-common European belief that Negroes have smaller brains, and are thus intellectually inferior, was scientifically unfounded, and based merely on the prejudice of travellers and explorers. + +==== Arthur Schopenhauer ==== + +The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) attributed civilizational primacy to the white races, who gained sensitivity and intelligence via the refinement caused by living in the rigorous Northern climate: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1a61228c6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 6/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + + The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer in colour than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Inca, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization. + +== Racial theories in physical anthropology (1850–1918) == + +The scientific classification established by Carl Linnaeus is requisite to any human racial classification scheme. In the 19th century, unilineal evolution, or classical social evolution, was a conflation of competing sociologic and anthropologic theories proposing that Western European culture was the acme of human socio-cultural evolution. The Christian Bible was interpreted to sanction slavery and from the 1820s to the 1850s was often used in the antebellum Southern United States, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman and Thomas R. R. Cobb, to enforce the idea that Negroes had been created inferior, and thus suited to slavery. + +=== Arthur de Gobineau === + +The French aristocrat and writer Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), is best known for his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) which proposed three human races (black, white and yellow) were natural barriers and claimed that race mixing would lead to the collapse of culture and civilization. He claimed that "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" and that any positive accomplishments or thinking of blacks and Asians were due to an admixture with whites. His works were praised by many white supremacist American pro-slavery thinkers such as Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze. +Gobineau believed that the different races originated in different areas, the white race had originated somewhere in Siberia, the Asians in the Americas and the blacks in Africa. He believed that the white race was superior, writing: + +I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains, who declare some Wolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot a good servant, that a Kaffir dances and plays the violin, that some Bambara knows arithmetic... Let us leave aside these puerilities and compare together not men, but groups. +Gobineau later used the term "Aryans" to describe the Germanic peoples (la race germanique). +Gobineau's works were also influential to the Nazi Party, which published his works in German. They played a key role in the master race theory of Nazism. + +=== Carl Vogt === + +Another polygenist evolutionist was Carl Vogt (1817–1895) who believed that the Negro race was related to the ape. He wrote the white race was a separate species to Negroes. In Chapter VII of his Lectures of Man (1864) he compared the Negro to the white race whom he described as "two extreme human types". The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negroes are a separate species from the whites. + +=== Charles Darwin === + +Charles Darwin's views on race have been a topic of much discussion and debate. According to Jackson and Weidman, Darwin was a moderate in the 19th century debates about race. "He was not a confirmed racist — he was a staunch abolitionist, for example — but he did think that there were distinct races that could be ranked in a hierarchy". +Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species did not discuss human origins. The extended wording on the title page, which adds by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, uses the general terminology of biological races as an alternative for "varieties" such as "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage", and does not carry the modern connotation of human races. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin examined the question of "Arguments in favour of, and opposed to, ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species" and reported no racial distinctions that would indicate that human races are discrete species. +The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4b915b0fb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 7/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Although Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did become a new instrument in the hands of the theorists of race and struggle... The Darwinist mood sustained the belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority which obsessed many American thinkers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The measure of world domination already achieved by the 'race' seemed to prove it the fittest. +According to the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, "The subtitle of [The Origin of Species] made a convenient motto for racists: 'The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.' Darwin, of course, took 'races' to mean varieties or species; but it was no violation of his meaning to extend it to human races.... Darwin himself, in spite of his aversion to slavery, was not averse to the idea that some races were more fit than others". +On the other hand, Robert Bannister defended Darwin on the issue of race, writing that "Upon closer inspection, the case against Darwin himself quickly unravels. An ardent opponent of slavery, he consistently opposed the oppression of nonwhites... Although by modern standards The Descent of Man is frustratingly inconclusive on the critical issues of human equality, it was a model of moderation and scientific caution in the context of midcentury racism". +According to Myrna Perez Sheldon, Darwin believed that different races gained their 'population-level characteristics' via sexual selection. Previously, race theorists conceptualized race as a 'stable blood essence' and that these 'essences' mixed when miscegenation occurred. + +=== Herbert Hope Risley === + +As an exponent of "race science", colonial administrator Herbert Hope Risley (1851–1911) used the ratio of the width of a nose to its height to divide Indian people into Aryan and Dravidian races, as well as seven castes. + +=== Ernst Haeckel === + +Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) supported a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen (German for 'original humans'), which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction. Haeckel was also an advocate of the out of Asia theory by writing that the origin of humanity was to be found in Asia; he believed that Hindustan (South Asia) was the actual location where the first humans had evolved. Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin's hypothesis of Africa. +Haeckel also wrote that Negroes have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negroes are related to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes. Haeckel compared Negroes to "four-handed" apes. Haeckel also believed Negroes were savages and that whites were the most civilised. + +=== Craniometry and physical anthropology === + +The Dutch scholar Pieter Camper (1722–89), an early craniometric theoretician, used "craniometry" (interior skull-volume measurement) to scientifically justify racial differences. In 1770, he conceived of the facial angle to measure intelligence among species of men. The facial angle was formed by drawing two lines: a horizontal line from nostril to ear; and a vertical line from the upper-jawbone prominence to the forehead prominence. Camper's craniometry reported that antique statues (the Greco-Roman ideal) had a 90-degree facial angle, whites an 80-degree angle, blacks a 70-degree angle, and the orangutan a 58-degree facial angle—thus he established a racist biological hierarchy for mankind, per the Decadent conception of history. Such scientific racist researches were continued by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and the anthropologist Paul Broca (1824–1880). + +==== Samuel George Morton ==== + +In the 19th century, an early American physical anthropologist, physician and polygenist Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), collected human skulls from worldwide, and attempted a logical classification scheme. Influenced by contemporary racialist theory, Dr Morton said he could judge racial intellectual capacity by measuring the interior cranial capacity, hence a large skull denoted a large brain, thus high intellectual capacity. Conversely, a small skull denoted a small brain, thus low intellectual capacity; superior and inferior established. After inspecting three mummies from ancient Egyptian catacombs, Morton concluded that Caucasians and Negroes were already distinct three thousand years ago. Since interpretations of the bible indicated that Noah's Ark had washed up on Mount Ararat only a thousand years earlier, Morton claimed that Noah's sons could not possibly account for every race on earth. According to Morton's theory of polygenesis, races have been separate since the start. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e9efe6721 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 8/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In Morton's Crania Americana, his claims were based on craniometry data, that the Caucasians had the biggest brains, averaging 87 cubic inches, Native Americans were in the middle with an average of 82 cubic inches and Negroes had the smallest brains with an average of 78 cubic inches. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), the evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould argued that Samuel Morton had falsified the craniometric data, perhaps inadvertently over-packing some skulls, to so produce results that would legitimize the racist presumptions he was attempting to prove. A subsequent study by the anthropologist John Michael found Morton's original data to be more accurate than Gould describes, concluding that "[c]ontrary to Gould's interpretation... Morton's research was conducted with integrity". Jason Lewis and colleagues reached similar conclusions as Michael in their reanalysis of Morton's skull collection; however, they depart from Morton's racist conclusions by adding that "studies have demonstrated that modern human variation is generally continuous, rather than discrete or "racial", and that most variation in modern humans is within, rather than between, populations". +In 1873, Paul Broca, founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris (1859), found the same pattern of measures—that Crania Americana reported—by weighing specimen brains at autopsy. Other historical studies, proposing a black race–white race, intelligence–brain size difference, include those by Bean (1906), Mall (1909), Pearl (1934), and Vint (1934). + +=== Nicolás Palacios === +After the War of the Pacific (1879–83) there was a rise of racial and national superiority ideas among the Chilean ruling class. In his 1918 book physician Nicolás Palacios argued for the existence of Chilean race and its superiority when compared to neighboring peoples. He thought Chileans were a mix of two martial races: the indigenous Mapuches and the Visigoths of Spain, who descended ultimately from Götaland in Sweden. Palacios argued on medical grounds against immigration to Chile from southern Europe claiming that Mestizos who are of south European stock lack "cerebral control" and are a social burden. + +=== Monogenism and polygenism === + +Samuel Morton's followers, especially Dr Josiah C. Nott (1804–1873) and George Gliddon (1809–1857), extended Dr Morton's ideas in Types of Mankind (1854), claiming that Morton's findings supported the notion of polygenism (mankind has discrete genetic ancestries; the races are evolutionarily unrelated), which is a predecessor of the modern human multiregional origin hypothesis. Moreover, Morton himself had been reluctant to espouse polygenism, because it theologically challenged the Christian creation myth espoused in the Bible. +Later, in The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin proposed the single-origin hypothesis, i.e., monogenism—mankind has a common genetic ancestry, the races are related, opposing everything that the polygenism of Nott and Gliddon proposed. + +=== Typologies === + +One of the first typologies used to classify various human races was invented by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), a theoretician of eugenics, who published in 1899 L'Aryen et son rôle social ("The Aryan and his social role"). In this book, he classified humanity into various, hierarchized races, spanning from the "Aryan white race, dolichocephalic", to the "brachycephalic", "mediocre and inert" race, best represented by Southern European, Catholic peasants". Between these, Vacher de Lapouge identified the "Homo europaeus" (Teutonic, Protestant, etc.), the "Homo alpinus" (Auvergnat, Turkish, etc.), and finally the "Homo mediterraneus" (Neapolitan, Andalus, etc.) Jews were dolichocephalic like the Aryans, according to Lapouge, but exactly for this reason he considered them to be dangerous; they were the only group, he thought, threatening to displace the Aryan aristocracy. Vacher de Lapouge became one of the leading inspirators of Nazi antisemitism and Nazi racist ideology. +Vacher de Lapouge's classification was mirrored in William Z. Ripley in The Races of Europe (1899), a book which had a large influence on American white supremacism. Ripley even made a map of Europe according to the alleged cephalic index of its inhabitants. He was an important influence of the American eugenist Madison Grant. + +Furthermore, according to John Efron of Indiana University, the late 19th century also witnessed "the scientizing of anti-Jewish prejudice", stigmatizing Jews with male menstruation, pathological hysteria, and nymphomania. At the same time, several Jews, such as Joseph Jacobs or Samuel Weissenberg, also endorsed the same pseudoscientific theories, convinced that the Jews formed a distinct race. Chaim Zhitlovsky also attempted to define Yiddishkayt (Ashkenazi Jewishness) by turning to contemporary racial theory. +Joseph Deniker (1852–1918) was one of William Z. Ripley's principal opponents; whereas Ripley maintained, as did Vacher de Lapouge, that the European populace comprised three races, Joseph Deniker proposed that the European populace comprised ten races (six primary and four sub-races). Furthermore, he proposed that the concept of "race" was ambiguous, and in its stead proposed the compound word "ethnic group", which later prominently featured in the works of Julian Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon. Moreover, Ripley argued that Deniker's "race" idea should be denoted a "type", because it was less biologically rigid than most racial classifications. + +== Ideological applications == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-8.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d0f1e6ec7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-8.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 9/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Nordicism === +Joseph Deniker's contribution to racist theory was La Race nordique (the Nordic race), a generic, racial-stock descriptor, which the American eugenicist Madison Grant (1865–1937) presented as the white racial engine of world civilization. Having adopted Ripley's three-race European populace model, but disliking the Teuton race name, he transliterated la race nordique into 'the Nordic race', the acme of the concocted racial hierarchy, based upon his racial classification theory, popular in the 1910s and 1920s. +The State Institute for Racial Biology (Swedish: Statens Institut för Rasbiologi) and its director Herman Lundborg in Sweden were active in racist research. Furthermore, much of early research on Ural-Altaic languages was coloured by attempts at justifying the view that European peoples east of Sweden were Asian and thus of an inferior race, justifying colonialism, eugenics and racial hygiene. The book The Passing of the Great Race (Or, The Racial Basis of European History) by American eugenicist, lawyer, and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant was published in 1916. Though influential, the book was largely ignored when it first appeared, and it went through several revisions and editions. Nevertheless, the book was used by people who advocated restricted immigration as justification for what became known as scientific racism. + +=== Justification of slavery in the United States === + +In the United States, scientific racism justified Black African slavery to assuage moral opposition to the Atlantic slave trade. In 1972, Alexander Thomas and Samuell Sillen documented how blacks' supposed "primitive mentality" +was used to justify black men as uniquely fitted for bondage. In 1851, in antebellum Louisiana, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863) wrote of slave escape attempts as "drapetomania", a treatable mental illness, that "with proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented". The term drapetomania (mania of the runaway slave) derives from the Greek δραπέτης (drapetes, 'a runaway [slave]') and μανία (mania, 'madness, frenzy'). Cartwright also described dysaesthesia aethiopica, called "rascality" by overseers. The 1840 United States census claimed that Northern, free blacks suffered mental illness at higher rates than did their Southern, enslaved counterparts. Though the census was later found to have been severely flawed by the American Statistical Association, it became a political weapon against abolitionists. Southern slavers concluded that escaping Negroes were suffering from "mental disorders". +At the time of the American Civil War (1861–1865), the matter of miscegenation prompted studies of ostensible physiological differences between Caucasians and Negroes. Early anthropologists, such as Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, and Samuel George Morton, aimed to scientifically prove that Negroes were a human species different from the white people; that the rulers of Ancient Egypt were not African; and that mixed-race offspring (the product of miscegenation) tended to physical weakness and infertility. After the Civil War, Southern (Confederacy) physicians wrote textbooks of scientific racism based upon studies claiming that black freemen (ex-slaves) were becoming extinct, because they were inadequate to the demands of being a free man—implying that black people benefited from enslavement. +In Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington noted the prevalence of two different views on blacks in the 19th century: the belief that they were inferior and "riddled with imperfections from head to toe", and the idea that they did not know true pain and suffering because of their primitive nervous systems (and that slavery was therefore justifiable). Washington noted the failure of scientists to accept the inconsistency between these two viewpoints, writing that: + +in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientific racism was simply science, and it was promulgated by the very best minds at the most prestigious institutions of the nation. Other, more logical medical theories stressed the equality of Africans and laid poor black health at the feet of their abusers, but these never enjoyed the appeal of the medical philosophy that justified slavery and, along with it, our nation's profitable way of life. +Even after the end of the Civil War, some scientists continued to justify the institution of slavery by citing the effect of topography and climate on racial development. Nathaniel Shaler, a prominent geologist at Harvard University from 1869 to 1906, published the book Man and the Earth in 1905 describing the physical geography of different continents and linking these geologic settings to the intelligence and strength of human races that inhabited these spaces. Shaler argued that North American climate and geology was ideally suited for the institution of slavery. + +=== South African apartheid === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-9.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-9.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..65b784739 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism-9.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Scientific racism" +chunk: 10/15 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:14.388711+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scientific racism played a role in establishing apartheid in South Africa. In South Africa, white scientists, like Dudly Kidd, who published The essential Kafir in 1904, sought to "understand the African mind". They believed that the cultural differences between whites and blacks in South Africa might be caused by physiological differences in the brain. Rather than suggesting that Africans were "overgrown children", as early white explorers had, Kidd believed that Africans were "misgrown with a vengeance". He described Africans as at once "hopelessly deficient", yet "very shrewd". +The Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem in South Africa played a key role in establishing apartheid in South Africa. According to one memorandum sent to Frederick Keppel, then president of the Carnegie Corporation, there was "little doubt that if the natives were given full economic opportunity, the more competent among them would soon outstrip the less competent whites". Keppel's support for the project of creating the report was motivated by his concern with the maintenance of existing racial boundaries. The preoccupation of the Carnegie Corporation with the so-called poor white problem in South Africa was at least in part the outcome of similar misgivings about the state of poor whites in the southern United States. +The report was five volumes in length. Around the start of the 20th century, white Americans, and whites elsewhere in the world, felt uneasy because poverty and economic depression seemed to strike people regardless of race. +Though the ground work for apartheid began earlier, the report provided support for this central idea of black inferiority. This was used to justify racial segregation and discrimination in the following decades. The report expressed fear about the loss of white racial pride, and in particular pointed to the danger that the poor white would not be able to resist the process of "Africanisation". +Although scientific racism played a role in justifying and supporting institutional racism in South Africa, it was not as important in South Africa as it has been in Europe and the United States. This was due in part to the "poor white problem", which raised serious questions for supremacists about white racial superiority. Since poor whites were found to be in the same situation as natives in the African environment, the idea that intrinsic white superiority could overcome any environment did not seem to hold. As such, scientific justifications for racism were not as useful in South Africa. + +=== Eugenics === + +Stephen Jay Gould described Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916) as "the most influential tract of American scientific racism". In the 1920s–30s, the German racial hygiene movement embraced Grant's Nordic theory. Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) coined the term Rassenhygiene in Racial Hygiene Basics (1895), and founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905. The movement advocated selective breeding, compulsory sterilization, and a close alignment of public health with eugenics. +Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but with emphasis on heredity—what philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has called state racism. In 1869, Francis Galton (1822–1911) proposed the first social measures meant to preserve or enhance biological characteristics, and later coined the term eugenics. Galton, a statistician, introduced correlation and regression analysis and discovered regression toward the mean. He was also the first to study human differences and inheritance of intelligence with statistical methods. He introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data on population sets, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for anthropometric studies. Galton also founded psychometrics, the science of measuring mental faculties, and differential psychology, a branch of psychology concerned with psychological differences between people rather than common traits. +Like scientific racism, eugenics grew popular in the early 20th century, and both ideas influenced Nazi racial policies and Nazi eugenics. In 1901, Galton, Karl Pearson (1857–1936) and Walter F. R. Weldon (1860–1906) founded the Biometrika scientific journal, which promoted biometrics and statistical analysis of heredity. Charles Davenport (1866–1944) was briefly involved in the review. In Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), he made statistical arguments that biological and cultural degradation followed white and black interbreeding. Davenport was connected to Nazi Germany before and during World War II. In 1939 he wrote a contribution to the festschrift for Otto Reche (1879–1966), who became an important figure within the plan to remove populations considered "inferior" from eastern Germany. + +== Interbellum to World War II == +Scientific racism continued through the early 20th century, and soon intelligence testing became a new source for racial comparisons. Before World War II (1939–45), scientific racism remained common to anthropology, and was used as justification for eugenics programs, compulsory sterilization, anti-miscegenation laws, and immigration restrictions in Europe and the United States. The war crimes and crimes against humanity of Nazi Germany (1933–45) discredited scientific racism in academia, but racist legislation based upon it remained in some countries until the late 1960s. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e69de29bb diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a0cb80ce7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 1/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices created by the American author L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard initially presented his ideas in 1950 as a form of talk therapy called Dianetics. He later expanded and reframed those ideas as a religion, which he named Scientology. In 1953, he founded the Church of Scientology, which, by one 2014 estimate, had around 30,000 members. +A core Scientology belief is that traumatic events cause subconscious command-like recordings in the mind, which may have occurred in past lives, and which can only be relieved through an activity called "auditing". Auditing and training to audit are the two primary activities in a Scientology organization and are outlined in a structured progression chart called The Bridge to Total Freedom, with the two main achievement levels being the status of "Clear" (the goal of the original Dianetics) and "Operating Thetan" (Scientology's version of spiritual freedom). Fees are charged for auditing and training. +The upper‑level teachings of the Operating Thetan levels are considered confidential and are only revealed to Scientologists when they reach each level. The texts, which involve a past life cosmology narrative, have been leaked and publicized, despite the Church of Scientology litigating to keep them confidential. +The Church has been involved in numerous controversies, legal disputes, and even criminal convictions. It has been variously described as a religion, a cult, a business, and a scam. Scientology is classified differently around the world, with some countries granting it religious status, while others treat it as a non-religious belief system, a commercial enterprise, or a suspicious activity subject to government monitoring. Its practices and leadership have been the subject of sustained investigative reporting, academic study, government inquiries, and popular media portrayals. + +== Legal status == + +The legal status of Scientology or Scientology-related organizations differs between jurisdictions. Scientology was legally recognized as a tax-exempt religion in Australia, Portugal, and Spain. Scientology was granted tax-exempt status in the United States in 1993. The organization is considered a cult in Chile and an "anticonstitutional sect" in Germany, and is considered a cult (French secte) by some French public authorities. +The Church of Scientology argues that Scientology is a genuine religious movement that has been misrepresented, maligned, and persecuted. The organization has pursued an extensive public relations campaign for the recognition of Scientology as a tax-exempt religion in the various countries in which it exists. +The Church of Scientology has often generated opposition due to its strong-arm tactics directed against critics and members wishing to leave the organization. A minority of governments regard it as a religious organization entitled to tax-exempt status, while other governments variously classify it as a business, cult, pseudoreligion, or criminal organization. +In 1957, the Church of Scientology of California was granted tax-exempt status by the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and so, for a time, were other local branches of the organization. In 1958 however, the IRS started a review of the appropriateness of this status. In 1959, Hubbard moved to England, remaining there until the mid-1960s. In 1967, the IRS removed Scientology's tax-exempt status, asserting that its activities were commercial and operated for the benefit of Hubbard, rather than for charitable or religious purposes. +In the mid-1960s, the Church of Scientology was banned in several Australian states, starting with Victoria in 1965. The ban was based on the Anderson Report, which found that the auditing process involved "command" hypnosis, in which the hypnotist assumes "positive authoritative control" over the patient. On this point the report stated: + +It is the firm conclusion of this Board that most scientology and dianetic techniques are those of authoritative hypnosis and as such are dangerous ... the scientific evidence which the Board heard from several expert witnesses of the highest repute ... leads to the inescapable conclusion that it is only in name that there is any difference between authoritative hypnosis and most of the techniques of scientology. Many scientology techniques are in fact hypnotic techniques, and Hubbard has not changed their nature by changing their names. +The Australian branch of the Scientology organization was forced to operate under the name of the "Church of the New Faith" as a result, the name and practice of Scientology having become illegal in the relevant states. Several years of court proceedings aimed at overturning the ban followed. In 1973, state laws banning Scientology were overturned in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. In 1983 the High Court of Australia ruled in a unanimous decision that the Church of Scientology was "undoubtedly a religion and deserving of tax exemption". + +== History == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dcf6d67a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 2/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Hubbard established an organization to promote his ideas about the mind, which he called Dianetics, in 1950. The organization went bankrupt, and Hubbard lost the rights to his book Dianetics in 1952. His ideas were rejected by the scientific community. As the 1950s developed, Hubbard saw the advantages of having his Scientology movement legally recognized as a religion. In an April 1953 letter to Helen O'Brien, his US business manager, he proposed that Scientology should be transformed into a religion: "We don't want a clinic. We want one in operation but not in name...It is a problem of practical business. I await your reaction on the religion angle". In reaction to a series of arrests of his followers, and the prosecution of Hubbard's Dianetics foundation for teaching medicine without a license, in December 1953 Hubbard incorporated three organizations – Church of American Science, Church of Scientology, and Church of Spiritual Engineering. By 1954, Hubbard had regained the rights to Dianetics. In 1959, Hubbard purchased Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, Sussex, United Kingdom, which became the worldwide headquarters of the Church of Scientology and his personal residence. +With the organization often under heavy criticism, it adopted strong measures of attack in dealing with its critics. +In 1962, amid FDA concerns, Hubbard announced Scientology's future was "being planned on a religious organization basis", but advising followers the change was "entirely a matter for accountants and solicitors". +In 1966, the organization established the Guardian's Office (GO), a department devoted to undermining those hostile towards Scientology. The GO launched an extensive program of countering negative publicity, gathering intelligence, and infiltrating organizations. In "Operation Snow White", the GO infiltrated the IRS and numerous other government departments and stole tens of thousands of documents pertaining to the Scientology organization, politicians, and celebrities. In July 1977, the FBI raided Church of Scientology premises in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, revealing the extent of the GO's infiltration into government departments and other groups. Eleven officials and agents of the Church were indicted. In December 1979, they were sentenced to between 4 and 5 years each and individually fined $10,000 (equivalent to $44,000 in 2025). Among those found guilty was Hubbard's then-wife, Mary Sue Hubbard. Public revelation of the GO's activities brought widespread condemnation of the Scientology organization. +In 1967, Hubbard established a new group, the Sea Organization or "Sea Org", the membership of which was drawn from the most committed members of the Scientology organization. By 1981, the 21-year-old David Miscavige, who had been one of Hubbard's closest aides in the Sea Org, rose to prominence. Hubbard died at his ranch in Creston, California, on January 24, 1986, and David Miscavige succeeded Hubbard as head of the organization. In 1993, the Internal Revenue Service dropped all litigation against the Scientology organization and recognized it as a religious institution. + +== Scientology analysis and criticism == + +== Beliefs and practices == + +Hubbard lies at the core of Scientology and his writings remain the source of its ideas and practices. Sociologist of religion David G. Bromley describes Scientology as Hubbard's "personal synthesis of philosophy, physics, and psychology". Hubbard claimed that he developed his ideas through research and experimentation, rather than through revelation from a supernatural source. He published hundreds of articles and books over the course of his life. Scientologists regard his writings on Scientology as scripture. +In Scientology Hubbard's work is regarded as perfect, and no elaboration or alteration is permitted. Hubbard described Scientology as an "applied religious philosophy", because, according to him, it consists of a metaphysical doctrine, a theory of psychology, and teachings in morality. Hubbard incorporated a variety of hypnotic techniques in Scientology auditing and courses. These are used as a means to create dependency and obedience in followers. +Hubbard developed thousands of neologisms during his lifetime. The nomenclature used by the movement is termed "Scientologese" by members. Scientologists are expected to learn this specialist terminology, the use of which separates followers from non-Scientologists. The Scientology organization refers to its practices as "technology", a term often shortened to "Tech". Scientologists stress the "standardness" of this "tech", by which they express belief in its infallibility. The Scientology organization's system of pedagogy is called "Study Tech" and is presented as the best method for learning. Scientology teaches that when reading, it is very important not to go past a word one does not understand. A person should instead consult a dictionary as to the meaning of the word before progressing, something Scientology calls "word clearing". +According to Scientology texts, its beliefs and practices are based on rigorous research, and its doctrines are accorded a significance equivalent to scientific laws. Blind belief is held to be of lesser significance than the practical application of Scientologist methods. Adherents are encouraged to validate the practices through their personal experience. Hubbard put it this way: "For a Scientologist, the final test of any knowledge he has gained is, 'did the data and the use of it in life actually improve conditions or didn't it?'" Many Scientologists avoid using the words "belief" or "faith" to describe how Hubbard's teachings impacts their lives, preferring to say that they "know" it to be true. Hubbard said the aim of Scientology is "A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war; where the world can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights". + +=== Thetan === + +=== Auditing === + +=== Operating Thetan levels === + +=== Space opera and the Wall of Fire === + +=== Ethics and justice === + + +=== Symbology === + +Scientology celebrates seven calendar events including L. Ron Hubbard's birthday, Auditor's Day, and New Year's. There is a Sunday service which is primarily of interest for non-members and beginners. Weddings and funerals are also held. + +=== Psychiatry, psychology, psychosis === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fac5f44f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 3/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scientology is vehemently opposed to psychiatry and psychology, and wants to replace them with its own methods. The clinical and academic psychiatry community rejected Hubbard's theories in the early 1950s. Hubbard and his early Dianetics organization were prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license in the early 1950s. +Hubbard taught that psychiatrists were responsible for a great many wrongs in the world, saying that psychiatry has at various times offered itself as a tool of political suppression and that psychiatry was responsible for the ideology of Hitler, for turning the Nazis into mass murderers, and the Holocaust. The Scientology organization operates the anti-psychiatry group Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), which operates Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, an anti-psychiatry museum. Though Hubbard had stated psychosis was not something Scientology dealt with, after noticing many Scientologists were suffering breakdowns after using his techniques he created the Introspection Rundown, a brutal and inhumane method to allegedly solve psychotic episodes. The rundown came under public scrutiny when in 1995 Scientologist Lisa McPherson suffered a mental breakdown and was removed from the hospital and held in isolation at a Church of Scientology for 17 days before she died. + +=== Views on Hubbard === +Scientologists view Hubbard as an extraordinary man, but do not worship him as a deity. They regard him as the preeminent Operating Thetan who remained on Earth in order to show others the way to spiritual liberation, the man who discovered the source of human misery and a technology allowing everyone to achieve their true potential. Church of Scientology management frames Hubbard's physical death as "dropping his body" to pursue higher levels of research not possible with an Earth-bound body. +Scientologists often refer to Hubbard affectionately as "Ron", and many refer to him as their "friend". The Scientology organization operates a calendar in which 1950, the year in which Hubbard's book Dianetics was published, is considered year zero, the beginning of an era. Years after that date are referred to as "AD" for "After Dianetics". They have also buried copies of his writings preserved on stainless steel disks in a secure underground vault in the hope of preserving them against major catastrophes. The Church of Scientology's view of Hubbard is presented in their hagiographical biography of him, seeking to present him as "a person of exceptional character, morals and intelligence". Critics of Hubbard and his organization claim that many of the details of his life as he presented it were false. Every Scientology Org maintains an office set aside for Hubbard in perpetuity, set out to imitate those he used in life, and will typically have a bust or large framed photograph of him on display. + +== The Church of Scientology == + +The Church of Scientology is headquartered at "Gold Base" in Riverside County, California, where the highest Sea Org officials work, and at "Flag Land Base" in Clearwater, Florida. The organization operates on a hierarchical and top-down basis, being largely bureaucratic in structure. The internal structure of Scientology organizations is strongly bureaucratic with a focus on its own statistics-based management system, and organizational operating budgets are performance-related and subject to frequent reviews. +By 2011, the organization was claiming over 700 centers in 65 countries. Smaller centres are called "missions". Missions are established by missionaries, who are referred to as "mission holders". Members can establish a mission wherever they wish but must fund it themselves; the missions are not financially supported by the central organization. Mission holders must purchase all of the necessary material from the central Church of Scientology; as of 2001, the Mission Starter Pack cost $35,000 (equivalent to $63,600 in 2025). + +Each mission or Org is a corporate entity, established as a licensed franchise, and operating as a commercial company. Each franchise sends part of its earnings, which have been generated through beginner-level auditing, to the International Management. Bromley observed that an entrepreneurial incentive system pervades the organization, with individual members and organizations receiving payment for bringing in new people or for signing them up for more advanced services. The individual and collective performances of different members and missions are gathered, being called "stats". Performances that are an improvement on the previous week are termed "up stats"; those that show a decline are "down stats". + +=== Internal organization === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cc88fd5b3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 4/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Sea Org is the organization's primary management unit, containing the highest ranks in its hierarchy. Its members are often recruited from the children of existing Scientologists, and sign up to a "billion-year contract" to serve the organization. Kent described that for adult Sea Org members with minor children, their work obligations took priority, damaged parent-child relations, and has led to cases of severe child neglect and endangerment. +The Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF) is the Church of Scientology's disciplinary program, where Sea Org members deemed to have seriously deviated from its teachings are placed. They will often face a hearing, the "Committee of Evidence", which determines if they will be sent to the RPF. The RPF operates out of several locations. It involves a daily regimen of five hours of auditing or studying, eight hours of work, often physical labor, such as building renovation, and at least seven hours of sleep. Journalists have condemned RPF practices for violating human rights; and criticized the Scientology organization for placing children as young as twelve into the RPF, engaging them in forced labor and denying access to their parents, violating Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The RPF has contributed to characterizations of the organization as a cult. +The Office of Special Affairs or OSA (formerly the Guardian's Office) is a department of the Church of Scientology which has been characterized as a non-state intelligence agency. It has targeted critics of the organization for "dead agent" operations, which is mounting character assassination operations against perceived enemies. +A 1990 article in the Los Angeles Times reported that in the 1980s the Scientology organization more commonly used private investigators, including former and current Los Angeles police officers, to give themselves a layer of protection in case embarrassing tactics were used and became public. The International Association of Scientologists operates to advance the cause of the Scientology organization and its members across the world. + +=== Promotional material === + +The Scientology organization employs a range of media to promote itself and attract converts. Hubbard promoted Scientology through a vast range of books, articles, and lectures. It publishes several magazines, including Source, Advance, The Auditor, and Freedom. It has established a publishing press, New Era, and the audiovisual publisher Golden Era. It has also used the Internet for promotional purposes, and employed advertising to attract potential converts, including in high-profile locations such as television ads during the 2014 and 2020 Super Bowls. +The organization has long used celebrities as a means of promoting itself, starting with Hubbard's "Project Celebrity" in 1955 and followed by its first Scientology Celebrity Centre in 1969. The Celebrity Centre headquarters is in Hollywood; other branches are in Dallas, Nashville, Las Vegas, New York City, and Paris. In 1955, Hubbard created a list of 63 celebrities targeted for conversion to Scientology. Prominent celebrities who have joined the organization include John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley, Nancy Cartwright, and Juliette Lewis. It uses celebrity involvement to make itself appear more desirable. Other new religious movements have similarly pursued celebrity involvement such as the Church of Satan, Transcendental Meditation, ISKCON, and the Kabbalah Centre. + +=== Social outreach === +Several Scientology organizations promote the use of Scientology practices as a means to solve social problems. Scientology began to focus on these issues in the early 1970s. The Church of Scientology developed outreach programs that say they aim to fight drug addiction, illiteracy, learning disabilities and criminal behavior. They have been presented to schools, businesses and communities as secular techniques based on Hubbard's writings. They have been described as part of the Scientology organization's "war" against the discipline of psychiatry. Some critics regard this outreach as merely a public relations exercise. +In 1966, the Church of Scientology repackaged Hubbard's theories about drugs into a drug rehabilitation program it calls Narconon, which purports to treat addicts through sweating in a sauna and using other Scientology techniques and processes. It has been described as a front group for recruiting into Scientology. Criminon is the organization's criminal rehabilitation program. Its Applied Scholastics program, established in 1972, employs Hubbard's pedagogical methods to help students. The Way to Happiness Foundation promotes a moral code written by Hubbard, to date translated into more than 40 languages. Narconon, Criminon, Applied Scholastics, and The Way to Happiness operate under the management banner of Association for Better Living and Education. +The World Institute of Scientology Enterprises (WISE) applies Scientology practices to business management. The most prominent training supplier to make use of Hubbard's technology is Sterling Management Systems. + +Hubbard devised the Volunteer Minister Program in 1973. They offer help and counseling to those in distress; this includes the Scientological technique of providing "assists". After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City, Volunteer Ministers were on the site of Ground Zero within hours of the attack; they subsequently went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Accounts of the Volunteer Ministers' effectiveness have been mixed, and touch assists are not supported by scientific evidence. +In 2010, hundreds of members of the Nation of Islam attended a Dianetics seminar near the group's Chicago headquarters, where they were introduced to Scientology auditing practices. Louis Farrakhan subsequently encouraged his followers to study Scientology, telling them that its techniques could help address the struggles of African Americans, and stated that "nobody can lead in our Nation until and unless they become clear." By 2012, according to the Nation of Islam newspaper The Final Call, more than 1,000 members had been certified as auditors and several thousand others were studying Scientology materials. The Church of Scientology opened new facilities in Harlem and Inglewood, California, and former officials reported that course costs for Nation members were sometimes reduced, though the Church denied giving special treatment. Farrakhan described the relationship as a "long and beautiful" alliance. + +=== Responses to opponents === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a49064688 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 5/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Scientology organization regards itself as the victim of media and governmental persecution, and the scholar of religion Douglas Cowan observed that "claims to systematic persecution and harassment" are part of the internal culture. In turn, Urban noted the organization has "tended to respond very aggressively to its critics, mounting numerous lawsuits and at times using extralegal means to respond to those who threaten it." The organization has often responded to criticism by ad hominem attacks. Its approach to targeting critics has often generated more negative attention for their organization, with Lewis commenting that it "has proven to be its own worst enemy" in this regard. +It has a reputation for litigiousness stemming from its involvement in a large number of legal conflicts. Barrett characterized the organization as "one of the most litigious religions in the world". It has conducted lawsuits against governments, organizations, and individuals, both to counter criticisms made against it and to gain legal recognition as a religion. J.P. Kumar, who studied the litigation, argued that victory was not always important to the organization; what was important was depleting the resources and energies of its critics. + +=== Suppressive persons and fair game === +Those deemed hostile to the Church of Scientology, including ex-members, are labeled "suppressive persons" or SPs. Hubbard maintained that 20 percent of the population would be classed as "suppressive persons" because they were truly malevolent or dangerous: "the Adolf Hitlers and the Genghis Khans, the unrepentant murderers and the drug lords". If the organization declares that one of its members is an SP, all other members are forbidden from further contact with them, an act it calls "disconnection". Any member breaking this rule is labeled a "potential trouble source" (PTS) and unless they swiftly cease all contact they can be labeled an SP themselves. +In an October 1968 letter to members, Hubbard wrote about a policy called "fair game" which was directed at SPs and other perceived threats to the organization. Here he stated that these individuals "may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologists. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed". Following strong criticism, the organization said that it formally ended Fair Game a month later, with Hubbard stating that he had never intended "to authorize illegal or harassment type acts against anyone." Critics and some scholarly observers argue that its practices reflect that the policy remains in place. It is "widely asserted" by former members that Fair Game is still employed; Stacy Brooks, a former member of the internal Office of Special Affairs, stated in court that "practices which were formerly called 'Fair Game' continue to be employed, although the term 'Fair Game' is no longer used." +Hubbard and his followers targeted many individuals as well as government officials and agencies, including a program of illegal infiltration of the IRS and other U.S. government agencies during the 1970s. They also conducted private investigations, character assassination and legal action against the organization's critics in the media. +The Scientology ethics and justice system regulates member behavior, and Ethics officers are present in every Scientology organization. Ethics officers ensure "correct application of Scientology technology" and deal with "behavior adversely affecting a Scientology organization's performance", ranging from "errors" and "misdemeanors" to "crimes" and "suppressive acts", as those terms defined by Scientology. + +== Scientologists == + +== Free Zone and independent Scientology == + +== Controversies == + +Urban described the Church of Scientology as "the world's most controversial new religion", while Lewis termed it "arguably the most persistently controversial" of contemporary new religious movements. According to Urban, the organization had "a documented history of extremely problematic behavior ranging from espionage against government agencies to shocking attacks on critics of the organization and abuse of its own members." +A first point of controversy was its response to its rejection by the scientific establishment. Another was a 1991 Time magazine article about the organization, which responded with a major lawsuit that was rejected by the court as baseless early in 1992. A third is its religious tax status in the United States, as the IRS granted the organization tax-exempt status in 1993. +It has been in conflict with the governments and police forces of many countries (including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany). It has been one of the most litigious religious movements in history, filing countless lawsuits against governments, organizations and individuals. +Hubbard himself was convicted of fraud in absentia by a French court in 1978 and sentenced to four years in prison. In 1992, a court in Canada convicted the Scientology organization in Toronto of spying on law enforcement and government agencies and criminal breach of trust, later upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud by a French court in 2009, a judgment upheld by the supreme Court of Cassation in 2013. +Reports and allegations have been made, by journalists, courts, and governmental bodies of several countries, that the Church of Scientology is an unscrupulous commercial enterprise that harasses its critics and brutally exploits its members. A considerable amount of investigation has been aimed at the organization, by groups ranging from the media to governmental agencies. +The controversies involving the Church of Scientology, some of them ongoing, include: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d1dac534e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 6/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Criminal behavior by members of the organization, including the infiltration of the US Government. +Organized harassment of people perceived as enemies of the Church of Scientology. +Scientology's disconnection policy, in which some members are required to shun friends or family members who are "antagonistic" to the organization. +The death of Scientologist Lisa McPherson while in the care of the organization. Robert Minton sponsored the multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Scientology for the death of McPherson. In May 2004, McPherson's estate and the Church of Scientology reached a confidential settlement. +Attempts to legally force search engines to censor information critical of the Scientology organization. +Allegations the organization's leader David Miscavige beats and demoralizes staff, and that physical violence by superiors towards staff working for them is a common occurrence in the organization. Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis denied these claims and provided witnesses to rebut them. +Stephen A. Kent, a professor of sociology, has said that "Scientologists see themselves as possessors of doctrines and skills that can save the world, if not the galaxy." As stated in Scientology doctrine: "The whole agonized future of this planet, every man, woman and child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology." Kent has described the Scientology ethics and justice system as "a peculiar brand of morality that uniquely benefited [the Church of Scientology] ... In plain English, the purpose of Scientology ethics is to eliminate opponents, then eliminate people's interests in things other than Scientology." +Many former members have come forward to speak out about the organization and the negative effects its teachings have had on them, including celebrities such as Leah Remini. Remini spoke about her split from the Church of Scientology, saying that she still maintains friendships within the organization, but is prohibited from communicating with those individuals. +Throughout the early 1950s, adherents of Hubbard were arrested for practicing medicine without a license. In January 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners brought proceedings against the Dianetic Research Foundation on the charge of teaching medicine without a license. In January 1963 U.S. Marshals raided the Founding Church of Scientology in Washington. Scientology social programs such as drug and criminal rehabilitation have also drawn both support and criticism. + +=== Hubbard's motives === +Common criticisms directed at Hubbard was that he drew upon pre-existing sources and the allegation that he was motivated by financial reasons. A number of Hubbard's letters and directives to his subordinates support the notion that he used religion as a façade for Scientology to maintain tax-exempt status and avoid further prosecutions (a number of Dianetics or Scientology practitioners had already been arrested) for medical claims. The IRS cited a statement frequently attributed to Hubbard that the way to get rich was to found a religion. Many of Hubbard's colleagues in the science fiction community, including Sam Merwin, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and Sam Moscowitz, recall Hubbard raising the topic in conversation. In 2006, Rolling Stone's Janet Reitman also attributed the statement to Hubbard, as a remark to science fiction writer Lloyd Eshbach and recorded in Eshbach's autobiography. + +=== Secrecy and deception === +Scientology has been called "America’s most secretive religion". +Some information about the Scientology belief system is kept hidden from most Scientologists, with layers of secrecy and obfuscation. +Hubbard and his followers have been accused of organized deception, and Hubbard taught insiders that "The only way you can control people is to lie to them." In 1983, Hubbard's estranged son Ronald DeWolf argued that "99% of what my father ever wrote or said about himself is totally untrue". + +=== Criminal behavior === + +In 1978, a number of Scientologists, including L. Ron Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard (who was second in command in the organization at the time), were convicted of perpetrating what was at the time the largest incident of domestic espionage in the history of the United States, called "Operation Snow White". This involved infiltrating, wiretapping, and stealing documents from the offices of Federal attorneys and the Internal Revenue Service. L. Ron Hubbard was convicted in absentia by French authorities of engaging in fraud and sentenced to four years in prison. The head of the French Church of Scientology was convicted at the same trial and given a suspended one-year prison sentence. +An FBI raid on the Church of Scientology's headquarters revealed documentation that detailed Scientology's criminal actions against various critics of the organization. In "Operation Freakout", agents of the organization attempted to destroy Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, an early book that had been critical of the movement. Among these documents was a plan to frame Gabe Cazares, the mayor of Clearwater, Florida, with a staged hit-and-run accident. Nine individuals related to the case were prosecuted on charges of theft, burglary, conspiracy, and other crimes. +In 1988, Scientology president Heber Jentzsch and ten other members of the organization were arrested in Spain on various charges including illicit association, coercion, fraud, and labor law violations. In October 2009, the Church of Scientology was found guilty of organized fraud in France. The sentence was confirmed by the court of appeal in February 2012, and by the supreme Court of Cassation in October 2013. In 2012, Belgian prosecutors indicted Scientology as a criminal organization engaged in fraud +and extortion. In March 2016, the Church of Scientology was acquitted of all charges, and demands to close its Belgian branch and European headquarters were dismissed. + +=== Organized harassment === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f6e1603f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 7/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scientology has historically engaged in hostile action toward its critics; executives within the organization have proclaimed that Scientology is "not a turn-the-other-cheek religion". Since the 1960s, Journalists, politicians, former Scientologists and various anti-cult groups have said that Scientology followers have engaged in organized hostility, harassment and threats, and Scientology has targeted these critics–almost without exception–for retaliation, in the form of lawsuits and public counter-accusations of personal wrongdoing. Many of Scientology's critics have also reported they were subject to threats and harassment in their private lives. +According to a 1990 Los Angeles Times article, the Scientology organization had largely switched from using members to using private investigators, including former and current Los Angeles police officers, as this gives the organization a layer of protection in case investigators use tactics which might cause the organization embarrassment. In one case, the organization described their tactics as "LAPD sanctioned", which was energetically disputed by Police Chief Daryl Gates. The officer involved in this particular case of surveillance and harassment was suspended for six months. +Journalist John Sweeney reported that "While making our BBC Panorama film Scientology and Me I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a 'bigot' by star Scientologists, brain-washed – that is how it felt to me – in a mock up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers". + +==== Mistreatment of members ==== +A prominent ex-member who has spoken out about the Scientology organization's mistreatment of members and ex-members is Leah Remini. Remini is an American actress that has been involved with the Church of Scientology since childhood. She left in 2013. In 2015 she published a book entitled Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology where she recounts her experiences and events leading up to her leaving the organization. +She also has produced a documentary television series on A&E entitled Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath released in 2017 which aired for three seasons. In this series, she and her co-host Mike Rinder, who is also an ex-member, tell their experiences and interview numerous ex-members with similar. Leah Remini has been outspoken about her views on the Church of Scientology and has raised much awareness about some of the major issues within the organization regarding treatment of children, exploitive money practices and mistreatments she has experienced. +As of August 2023, Remini has filed a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology. She alleges verbal, physical and sexual abuse was known and tolerated by the organization, and exploitive practices such as signing billion-year contracts with the organization. The main claims of the lawsuit are for psychological torture, defamation, surveillance, harassment, and intimidation experienced by her for years while a member, and as tactics used after she publicly left. + +=== Violation of auditing confidentiality === +During the auditing process, the auditor collects and records personal information from the client. While the Church of Scientology claims to protect the confidentiality of auditing records, the organization has a history of attacking and psychologically abusing former members using information culled from the records. For example, a December 16, 1969, a Guardian's Office order (G. O. 121669) by Mary Sue Hubbard explicitly authorized the use of auditing records for purposes of "internal security". Former members report having participated in combing through information obtained in auditing sessions to see if it could be used for smear campaigns against critics. + +=== Allegations of coerced abortions === + +The Sea Org originally operated on vessels at sea where it was understood that it was not permitted to raise children on board the ships because "children hinder adults from performing their vital assignments". Women who became pregnant have stated that they had been "coercively persuaded" to undergo abortions in order to remain in the Sea Org. +In 2003, The Times of India reported "Forced abortions, beatings, starvation are considered tools of discipline in this church". A former high-ranking source reports that "some 1,500 abortions" have been "carried out by women in the Sea Organization since the implementation of a rule in the late 80s that members could not remain in the organization if they decided to have children". The source noted that "And if members who have been in the Sea Organization for, say, 10 years do decide to have kids, they are dismissed with no more than $1,000" as a severance package. + +Longtime member Astra Woodcraft left Scientology for good when the organization tried to pressure her to have an abortion. Former Sea Org member Karen Pressley recounted that she was often asked by fellow Scientologists for loans so that they could get an abortion and remain in the Sea Org. Scientology employee Claire Headley has said she "was forced to have (two) abortions to keep her job and was subjected to violations of personal rights and liberties for the purpose of obtaining forced labor". Laura DeCrescenzo reported she was "coerced to have an abortion" as a minor, and sued in 2009. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..680ed2e95 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 8/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In March 2009 a former Scientologist reported that women who worked at Scientology's headquarters were forced to have abortions, or faced being declared a "suppressive person" by the organization's management. In March 2010, former Scientologist Janette Lang stated that at age 20 she became pregnant by her boyfriend while in the organization, and her boyfriend's Scientology supervisors "coerced them into terminating the pregnancy". "We fought for a week, I was devastated, I felt abused, I was lost and eventually I gave in. It was my baby, my body and my choice, and all of that was taken away from me by Scientology", said Lang. +Australian Senator Nick Xenophon gave a speech to the Australian Parliament in November 2009, about statements he had received from former Scientologists. He said that he had been told members of the organization had coerced pregnant female employees to have abortions. "I am deeply concerned about this organisation and the devastating impact it can have on its followers," said Senator Xenophon, and he requested that the Australian Senate begin an investigation into Scientology. According to the letters presented by Senator Xenophon, the organization was involved in "ordering" its members to have abortions. +Former Scientologist Aaron Saxton sent a letter to Senator Xenophon stating he had participated in coercing pregnant women within the organization to have abortions. "Aaron says women who fell pregnant were taken to offices and bullied to have an abortion. If they refused, they faced demotion and hard labour. Aaron says one staff member used a coat hanger and self-aborted her child for fear of punishment," said Senator Xenophon. Carmel Underwood, another former Scientologist, said she had been put under "extreme pressure" to have an abortion, and that she was placed into a "disappearing programme", after refusing. Underwood was the executive director of Scientology's branch in Sydney. +Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis said these statements are "utterly meritless". Mike Ferriss, the head of Scientology in New Zealand, told media that "There are no forced abortions in Scientology". Scientology spokesperson Virginia Stewart likewise denied the statements and asserted "The Church of Scientology considers the family unit and children to be of the utmost importance and does not condone nor force anyone to undertake any medical procedure whatsoever." + +=== Allegation of human trafficking and other crimes against women === + +A number of women have sued the Church of Scientology, alleging a variety of complaints including human trafficking, rape, forced labor, and child abuse. In 2009, two former Sea Org employees, Marc and Claire Headley, sued the Church of Scientology alleging human trafficking. + +=== Scientology, litigation, and the Internet === + +In the 1990s, Miscavige's organization took action against increased criticism of Scientology on the Internet and online distribution of Scientology-related documents. Starting in 1991, Scientology filed fifty lawsuits against Scientology-critic Cult Awareness Network (CAN). Many of the suits were dismissed, but one resulted in $2 million in losses, bankrupting the network. At bankruptcy, CAN's name and logo were obtained by a Scientologist. A New Cult Awareness Network was set up with Scientology backing, which says it operates as an information and networking center for non-traditional religions, referring callers to academics and other experts. +In a 1993 U.S. lawsuit brought by the Church of Scientology against former member Steven Fishman, Fishman made a court declaration which included several dozen pages of formerly secret esoterica detailing aspects of Scientologist cosmogony. As a result of the litigation, this material, normally strictly safeguarded and used only in Scientology's more advanced "OT levels", found its way onto the Internet. This resulted in a battle between the Scientology organization and its online critics over the right to disclose this material, or safeguard its confidentiality. The organization was forced to issue a press release acknowledging the existence of this cosmogony, rather than allow its critics "to distort and misuse this information for their own purposes". +In January 1995, Church of Scientology lawyer Helena Kobrin attempted to shut down the newsgroup alt.religion.scientology by sending a control message instructing Usenet servers to delete the group. In practice, this rmgroup message had little effect, since most Usenet servers are configured to disregard such messages when sent to groups that receive substantial traffic, and newgroup messages were quickly issued to recreate the group on those servers that did not do so. However, the issuance of the message led to a great deal of public criticism by free-speech advocates. Among the criticisms raised, one suggestion is that Scientology's true motive is to suppress the free speech of its critics. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-8.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bff6af681 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology-8.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Scientology" +chunk: 9/9 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:15.565462+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Church of Scientology also began filing lawsuits against those who posted copyrighted texts on the newsgroup and the World Wide Web, lobbied for tighter restrictions on copyrights in general, and supported the controversial Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act as well as the even more controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). +Beginning in the middle of 1996 and ensuing for several years, the newsgroup was attacked by anonymous parties using a tactic dubbed sporgery by some, in the form of hundreds of thousands of forged spam messages posted on the group. Some investigators said that some spam had been traced to members of the Church of Scientology. Former Scientologist Tory Christman later asserted that the Office of Special Affairs had undertaken a concerted effort to destroy alt.religion.scientology through these means; the effort failed. +On January 14, 2008, a video produced by the Scientology organization featuring an interview with Tom Cruise was leaked to the Internet and uploaded to YouTube. The Church of Scientology issued a copyright violation claim against YouTube requesting the removal of the video. Calling the action by the Church of Scientology a form of Internet censorship, participants of Anonymous coordinated Project Chanology, consisting of a series of denial-of-service attacks against Scientology websites, prank calls, and black faxes to Scientology centers. +On January 21, 2008, Anonymous announced its intentions via a video posted to YouTube entitled "Message to Scientology", and a press release declaring a "war" against the Church of Scientology and the Religious Technology Center. In the press release, the group stated that the attacks against the organization would continue in order to protect the freedom of speech, and end what they saw as the financial exploitation of members of the organization. + +On January 28, 2008, an Anonymous video appeared on YouTube calling for protests outside Church of Scientology buildings on February 10, 2008. The date was chosen because it was the birthday of Lisa McPherson. According to a letter Anonymous e-mailed to the press, about 7,000 people protested in more than 90 cities worldwide. Many protesters wore masks based on the character V from V for Vendetta (who was influenced by Guy Fawkes) or otherwise disguised their identities, in part to protect themselves from reprisals from the Church of Scientology. Many further protests have followed since then in cities around the world. +The Arbitration Committee of the Wikipedia internet encyclopedia decided in May 2009 to restrict access to its site from Church of Scientology IP addresses, to prevent self-serving edits by Scientologists. A "host of anti-Scientologist editors" were topic-banned as well. The committee concluded that both sides had "gamed policy" and resorted to "battlefield tactics", with articles on living persons being the "worst casualties". + +== Reception and influence == +Scientology has influenced various therapy and spiritual groups formed since the 1960s. Much past-life therapy was influenced by Dianetics, while others, including groups founded by former Scientologists, drew on Scientology. +Many of the organization's critics have utilized the internet, for instance to disseminate leaked confidential documents. The Church of Scientology has sought to sue websites for disseminating Hubbard's writings. +The German government is largely hostile to the Church of Scientology, considering it a threat to democracy, and banning Scientologists in Germany from working in the public sector. Scientologists in France have reported being fired or refused jobs because of their beliefs. A 2022 YouGov poll on American attitudes toward religious groups ranked Scientology as the country's least-favored group, with around 50% of respondents indicating a negative view of the practice, alongside Satanism. +Scientology has received an extraordinary amount of media interest. Hubbard often described journalists in negative terms, calling them "merchants of chaos", and discouraged Scientologists from interacting with journalists. + +=== Popular culture === + +== See also == +Scientology and religious groups +Scientology and homosexuality + +== Notes == + +== References == + +=== Sources === + +== External links == + +Scientology – Is This a Religion? by Stephen A. Kent +An Annotated Bibliographical Survey of Primary and Secondary Literature on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology +Lord, Phil (2019). "Scientology's Legal System". Marburg Journal of Religion. 21 (1). Marburg Journal of Religion. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3232113. SSRN 3232113. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-0.md index ef6cecf5f..f1418bda3 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:05:59.657693+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:17.941253+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-1.md index 0cf62e511..445bb0f33 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:05:59.657693+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:17.941253+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-2.md index e2bb4640e..e0f2054b7 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:05:59.657693+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:17.941253+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-3.md index 250e25d2c..ddb92e190 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptural_geologist" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:05:59.657693+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:17.941253+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bc29b3425 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Scrying" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:19.233598+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Scrying, also referred to as "seeing" or "peeping," is a practice rooted in divination and fortune-telling. It involves gazing into a medium, hoping to receive significant messages or visions that could offer personal guidance, prophecy, revelation, or inspiration. The practice lacks a definitive distinction from other forms of clairvoyance or divination but generally relies on visions within the chosen medium. Unlike augury, which interprets observable events, or divination, which follows standardized rituals, scrying's impressions arise within the medium itself. +The terminology and methods of scrying are diverse and lack a standardized structure. Practitioners coin terms such as "crystallomancy," "spheromancy," or "catoptromancy," naming practices based on the medium or technique employed. These practices have been reinvented throughout history, spanning cultures and regions. Scrying media encompasses reflective, refractive, or luminescent surfaces like crystals, mirrors, water, fire, or smoke. Some practitioners even close their eyes, engaging in "eyelid scrying." +Methods of scrying often include self-induced trances, using media like crystal balls or even modern technology like smartphones. Practitioners enter a focused state that reduces mental clutter, enabling the emergence of visual images. These initial images, however trivial, are amplified during the trance. Some scryers report that they hear their voice affirming what they see, creating a mental feedback loop. +Throughout history, various traditions and cultures have practiced scrying as a means of revealing the past, present, or future. The practice involves diverse media, from reflective surfaces to shimmering mirages, and is often accompanied by rituals inducing altered states of consciousness. Despite its popularity in occult circles and its portrayal in media, scrying lacks empirical support and has been met with skepticism from the scientific community. + +== Definitions and terminology == +There is no definitive distinction between scrying and other aids to clairvoyance, augury, or divination, but roughly speaking, scrying depends on impressions of visions in the medium of choice. Ideally in this respect it differs from augury, which relies on interpretations of objectively observable objects or events (such as flight of birds); from divination, which depends on standardized processes or rituals; from oneiromancy, which depends on the interpretation of dreams; from the physiological effects of psychoactive drugs; and from clairvoyance, which notionally does not depend on objective sensory stimuli. Clairvoyance in other words, is regarded as amounting in essence to extrasensory perception. +Scrying is neither a single, clearly defined, nor formal discipline and there is no uniformity in the procedures, which repeatedly and independently have been reinvented or elaborated in many ages and regions. Furthermore, practitioners and writers coin terminology so arbitrarily, and often artificially, that no one system of nomenclature can be taken as authoritative and definitive. Commonly terms in use are Latinisations or Hellenisations of descriptions of the media or activities. Examples of names coined for crystal gazing include 'crystallomancy', 'spheromancy', and 'catoptromancy'. As an example of the looseness of such terms, catoptromancy should refer more specifically to scrying by use of mirrors or other reflective objects rather than by crystal gazing. Other names that have been coined for the use of various scrying media include anthracomancy for glowing coals, turifumy for scrying into smoke, and hydromancy for scrying into water. There is no clear limit to the coining and application of such terms and media. +Scrying has been practiced in many cultures in the belief that it can reveal the past, present, or future. Some practitioners assert that visions that come when one stares into the media are from the subconscious or imagination, while others say that they come from gods, spirits, devils, or the psychic mind, depending on the culture and practice. There is neither any systematic body of empirical support for any such views in general however, nor for their respective rival merits; individual preferences in such matters are arbitrary. +Alternatively the medium might reduce visual stimuli to thresholds below which any clear impressions could interfere with fancied visions or free association. Examples include darkened reflections of night sky, or plain shadow or darkness. + +== Methods == +One class of methods of scrying involves a self-induced trance, with or without the aid of a medium such as a crystal ball or, even via modern technology such as a smartphone among other things. Some say that the sensation is drug-like, some that various drugs can potentiate the experience; others categorically exclude any connection with drug usage, believing that it invalidates any images observed. +Many practitioners say that the scrying medium initially serves to focus attention, removing unwanted thoughts from the mind in much the same way as repetition of a mantra, concentration on a mandala, inducing the relaxation response, or possibly by hypnosis. Once this stage is achieved, the scryer may begin free association with the perceived images. The technique of deliberately looking for and declaring these initial images aloud, however trivial or irrelevant they may seem to the conscious mind, attempts to deepen the trance state. In this state some scryers hear their own disassociated voices affirming what they see, in a mental feedback loop. +Practitioners apply the process until they achieve a satisfactory state of perception in which rich visual images and dramatic stories seem to be projected within the medium itself, or in the mind's eye of the scryer. They report that the technique allows them to see relevant events or images within the chosen medium. +Nostradamus practiced scrying; he would stare into a bowl of water or a magic mirror to see the future while he was in trance. + +== Religion and mythology == + +=== Hebrew Bible === +Divination is briefly mentioned in chapter 44 of the Book of Genesis. A silver chalice or cup is deliberately planted in Benjamin's sack when he leaves Egypt, later to be used as evidence of theft. It is revealed the cup belongs to Joseph, the vizier of Egypt, whose steward said it was used for drinking and divination during the course of his accusation. This is mentioned to reinforce his disguise as an Egyptian nobleman. + +=== Ancient Persia === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ec2de7034 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +title: "Scrying" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrying" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:19.233598+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Shahnameh, a 10th-century epic work narrating historical and mythological past of Persia, gives a description of what was called the Cup of Jamshid (Jaam-e Jam), which was used by the ancient (mythological) Persian kings for observing all of the seven layers of the universe. The cup was said to contain an elixir of immortality, but without cogent explanation for any relevance of the elixir to the scrying function. + +=== Latter Day Saint movement === + +In the late 1820s, Joseph Smith founded the Latter Day Saint movement based in part on insights gained from the reflections of seer stones. Smith had at least three separate stones which he used initially in treasure-hunting expeditions. Subsequently, he took to placing his favorite stone inside his hat to read what he said were miraculous reflections from the stone. Smith also said he possessed a pair of spectacles manufactured from seer stones, which he called the Urim and Thummim and which he said enabled him to translate the golden plates that are the stated source of the Book of Mormon. + +== In folklore == + +Rituals that involve many acts similar to scrying in ceremonial magic are retained in the form of folklore and superstition. A formerly widespread tradition held that young women gazing into a mirror in a darkened room (often on Halloween) could catch a glimpse of their future husband's face in the mirror — or a skull personifying Death if their fate was to die before they married. +Another form of the tale, involving the same actions of gazing into a mirror in a darkened room, is used as a supernatural dare in the tale of "Bloody Mary". Here, the motive is usually to test the adolescent gazers' mettle against a malevolent witch or ghost, in a ritual designed to allow the scryers' easy escape if the visions summoned prove too frightening. +Folklore superstitions such as those just mentioned, are not to be distinguished clearly from traditional tales, within which the reality of such media are taken for granted. In the fairytale of Snow White for example, the jealous queen consults a magic mirror, which she asks "Magic mirror on the wall / Who is the fairest of them all?", to which the mirror always replies "You, my queen, are fairest of all." But when Snow White reaches the age of seven, she becomes as beautiful as the day, and when the queen asks her mirror, it responds: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you." There is no uniformity among believers, in how seriously they prefer to take such tales and superstitions. + +== In Western esotericism == + +The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888-c.1902 in its original form) taught their own version of scrying that could be done individually or as a group. It emphasized three levels: + +"Scrying in the Spirit Vision" with an emphasis on inner seeing by focusing on a symbol or mirror, +"Traveling in the Spirit Vision" involves going to the place seen and interacting with what is found there, +"Rising on the Planes" focuses on a spiritual process (involving scrying via the Tree of Life) that has the potential to elevate consciousness to the level of the Divine. + +== Scientific reception == +Scrying is not supported by science as a method of predicting the future or obtaining information unavailable to empirical investigation. Some critics consider it to be a pseudoscience. Skeptics consider scrying to be the result of delusion or wishful thinking. +Psychologist Leonard Zusne suggested that scrying images are hallucinations or hypnagogic experiences. +A 2010 paper in the journal Perception identified one specific method of reliably reproducing a scrying illusion in a mirror and hypothesized that it "might be caused by low level fluctuations in the stability of edges, shading and outlines affecting the perceived definition of the face, which gets over-interpreted as ‘someone else’ by the face recognition system." + +== See also == + +== References == + Some content in this article was copied from Glass candle at A Wiki of Ice and Fire, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license. + +=== Works cited === +Besterman, Theodore (1924). Crystal Gazing: Study in the History, Distribution, Theory and Practice of Scrying. London: Rider. +Eason, Cassandra (2007). Scrying the Secrets of the Future: How to Use Crystal Balls, Water, Fire, Wax, Mirrors, Shadows, and Spirit Guides to Reveal Your Destiny. Career Press. ISBN 978-1-56414-908-4. +Ellis, Bill (2004). Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. University of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2289-9. +Greer, Mary K. (1995). Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses. Park Street Press. ISBN 978-0892816071. +Rawcliffe, D. H. (1987). Occult and Supernatural Phenomena. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-25551-4. +Thomas, Northcote Whitridge (1905). Crystal Gazing: Its History and Practice with a Discussion on the Evidence for Telepathic Scrying. London: Alexander Moring Limited: The De La More Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link) +Zusne, Leonard; Jones, Warren H. (1989). Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0-805-80507-9. + +== Further reading == +De Camp, Lyon Sprague (1980). The Ragged Edge of Science. Owlswick Press. ISBN 0-913896-06-3. +Lang, Andrew (1900). "Crystal Visions, Savage and Civilised". The Making of Religion. London: Longmans. pp. 83–104. Archived from the original on 2008-08-06. Retrieved 2006-09-30. +Tyson, Donald (1997). Scrying for Beginners: Tapping into the Supersensory Powers of Your Subconscious. Llewellyn Publications. +Wiseman, Richard (2011). Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-75298-6. + +== External links == + +Scrying - Skeptic's Dictionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Clearly_Method-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Clearly_Method-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..007a7587a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Clearly_Method-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +title: "See Clearly Method" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_Clearly_Method" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:21.615149+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The See Clearly Method was an eye-exercise program that was marketed as an alternative to the use of glasses, contact lenses, and eye surgery to improve vision. Sales were halted by legal action in 2006. The method is not supported by basic science, and no research studies were conducted prior to marketing. The program is based in part on the Bates method, an alternative therapy devised in the early 20th century, which lacks clinical evidence to support the claim that it can improve eyesight. + + +== History == +The See Clearly Method was created by four individuals who called themselves the "American Vision Institute": optometrist David W. Muris, optometrist Merrill J. Allen, psychologist Francis A. Young, and nuclear chemist Steven Beresford. In 1996, they authored a book titled Improve Your Vision Without Glasses or Contact Lenses: A New Program of Therapeutic Eye Exercises, on which the later system was based. When Fairfield, Iowa, businessman Cliff Rose saw the book, he asked that the authors develop the program. Along with attorney David Sykes, Rose created Vision Improvement Technologies, which owned and marketed the See Clearly Method, which was heavily advertised on radio and television from 2001 to 2006, with the endorsement of actress Mariette Hartley. +The See Clearly Method and related approaches have been described as "amply critiqued and debunked." A 2005 Ohio State University study found no significant results in the application of the method. +Both the Journal of the American Optometric Association and the Journal of Behavioral Optometry declined to publish a study by the American Vision Institute purportedly demonstrating the efficacy of the method. The AVI then self-published the paper on their website. + + +== Techniques == +Some of the program's techniques were adapted from the Bates method, a collection of techniques developed by William Bates in the early 20th century. These techniques were based on Bates' own unorthodox theories, which have been consistently rejected by the scientific and medical community. Still, no evidence suggests that the Bates method, in whole or in part, is effective. +Some of the See Clearly Method's techniques are: + +"Tromboning" involved holding a small object at varying distances from one's eyes, inhaling as it was moved in and exhaling as it was moved out. The program's manual stated, "Tromboning exercises the focusing mechanism, improves control of the extraocular muscles, and stimulates the flow of nutrients inside the eyes". +The Scanning Chart exercise involved moving a chart just out of focus, then jumping from dot to dot in time with the music on the program's exercise video. +The program recommended Acupressure, in essence a massage for muscles surrounding the eye. +"Blur reading" entailed turning a magazine upside-down at a distance from which the words were unclear, selecting a word and running one's gaze around it, and then around any letters one could recognize. +Personal affirmations such as "I am seeing better each day" or "I can see without my glasses" were suggested. +Light therapy, a variation of Bates's "sunning", involved sitting with one's eyes closed and the face six inches from an unshaded 150-watt bulb, just far enough to make the eyes "pleasantly warm but not too hot", according to the manual. +"Palming", another technique adapted from Bates, involved closing the eyes and resting them against the palms. +"Hydrotherapy", involved alternately placing hot and cold water-soaked towels over the eyes. +The See Clearly Method kit was sold at $350. + + +== Legal action == +Wisconsin's Consumer Protection had issued a warning that half of the kit buyers in the State had returned it. +Iowa State Attorney General Tom Miller filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against Vision Improvement Technologies, the promoter of the See Clearly Method, in 2005. The lawsuit alleged that "Vision Improvement Technologies uses a combination of misleading and unfair marketing tactics to sell their kits, including exaggerated claims of effectiveness, false implications of scientific validity, and misleading consumer testimonials in advertising." In February 2006 an Iowa court issued a temporary injunction restricting certain aspects of the company's marketing. A November 2, 2006, press release from the Iowa Attorney General's office announced a consent decree with Vision Improvement under which the company will halt sales, offer restitution to customers, clear customers' credit records of any filings related to See Clearly purchases, and halt operations as of December 2006. +On December 18, 2006, the company's web site stated, "As of November 1, 2006 The See Clearly Method is no longer available for sale." In response to a 2007 complaint by the California Attorney General's office concerning David Muris' involvement with the See Clearly Method, Muris was placed on probation for five years in 2008 by the state Board of Optometry. + + +== See also == +Quackery +Margaret Darst Corbett + + +== Bibliography == +Beresford, Steven M.; Muris, David W.; Allen, Merril J.; Young, Francis A. (1996). Improve Your Vision Without Glasses or Contact Lenses: A new program of therapeutic eye exercise. Touchstone. ISBN 978-0684814384. + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Promotional video (2002) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c8f56b15c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Sensory history" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:59.829274+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Sensory history is an area of academic study which examines the role conceptions of our senses have played in the past. It developed partly as a reaction to the lack of serious attention given to sensory experience in traditional history books, which often treat sensory experience as a writing technique rather than a serious avenue of enquiry. Works of sensory history try to convey a deeper understanding of the past through an emphasis on physical experiences. +One of the most significant proponents of sensory history is the American historian Mark M. Smith. Anthropological approaches to sensory studies have had a notable influence on sensory history and there has been significant discussion and overlap between the two disciplines. The transient nature of sensory experience makes sensory history a difficult topic to study and write about. This challenge is reflected in debate within the field, such as what methods of presentation are appropriate for works of sensory history. + +== History == +Karl Marx drew attention to the possibility of sensory history in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which he stated that "the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present." In 1942 Lucien Febvre, a French historian and one of the founders of the Annales School, called for the history of sensibilities to be examined and so is credited as one of the first historians to consider the senses as a legitimate historical field of study. +The development of sensory history has also been influenced by other academic disciplines, such as philosophy and anthropology. The idea that sight is the most important sense of the modern era was particularly argued by philosopher Michel Foucault. Philosophers Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong expanded on this idea in their theory of 'the great divide'. The theory claims that the invention of the printing press caused a fundamental shift in how people used their senses – from hearing being the most important sense, to sight. The concept of the pre-eminence of sight in the modern world, has also prompted a particular focus on the other four senses in works of sensory history in order to readdress this inequality. Anthropologists such as David Howes and Constance Classen have also made significant contributions to the study of sensory history, particularly in regards to the importance of context in sensory histories, through their work within the broader field of sensory studies. +Historian Alain Corbin produced one of the first books focussing exclusively on sensory history in 1982, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, a discussion on the role of smell in 18th and 19th century France. In 1994 George H. Roeder wrote the essay Coming to Our Senses, which claimed that historical studies were still lacking in engagement with the senses, particularly history textbooks. The historian who has most represented sensory history in the 21st century is Mark M. Smith, who has written both a book on the subject of sensory history itself and books which examine historical events through the senses. + +== Method == +Sensory history is often written because of a significant lack of any examination of the sensory in a particular historical area previously. This means that sensory historians can simply re-examine primary and secondary sources, with a lens for the sensory, in order to support their work. Historian Mark M. Smith refers to sensory history as a 'habit' that can be used across many fields of historical study. Historicising the senses is an important concept for sensory historians when conducting research, and this means considering the senses in their historical context while putting aside more modern conceptions of the senses. This concept lies at the heart of many sensory histories because if accounts of sensory experience cannot be taken at face-value then a more rigorous examination is required. The idea of historicising the senses is significantly influenced by sensory anthropological studies. Sensory history is a field which lends itself to inter-disciplinary cooperation with fields such as anthropology and media studies. +Because sensory history concerns itself with the sensory experiences of individuals, it is linked to the notion of 'bottom up' history, which focusses on the lives of ordinary people throughout history. + +=== Inter-sensoriality === +Inter-sensoriality (also spelt intersensoriality) is a word used by sensory historians to describe one of the goals of sensory history, which is to consider the five senses together and how they work in concert. Works of history which consider the whole inter-sensoriality of a subject aim to provide a more complete and engaging perspective on history. Historians of food, long wedded to an approach that privileged taste (both as a property of individual foods and as a means of social distinction in matters culinary), now give a pride of place to all five senses when analysing goods, dishes, and meals. They also describe how the industrialisation of food production went hand in hand with the ways in which attention to the senses helped invent, formulate, and produce goods like tin-cans, cheeses or convenience foods (tv dinners) that were acceptable and appealing to consumers' eyes, noses, ears, teeth, and tongues. In doing so, they pay special attention to social class, gender, and other organising principles of society. + +== Challenges == +The question of how to present sensory history is a significant challenge. Sensory experience is in nature transient, so historians must consider how best to represent and discuss this. A further challenge for sensory historians when conducting sensory history is how to access sensory experiences of the past. Written descriptions of sensory experiences are numerous and often used, but some historians take this further and attempt to recreate past sensory experiences, in the hope that by experiencing it themselves they can better understand the past. In regards to this dilemma, historian Alain Corbin states that the historian is always a "prisoner of language" when investigating the past. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..93aff6383 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Sensory history" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:59.829274+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Debate == +The method of presentation of sensory history has been a significant topic of debate in the field of sensory history. Historians such as Peter Charles Hoffer place priority upon the communication of their work to their audience. This can involve more creative methods of presentation, such as living museums or interactive exhibitions, in order for the audience to more deeply experience and understand the past. Other historians, such as Mark M. Smith, disagree with this method of presentation, as priority is placed upon the historicity of the senses. Smith contends that how people sense now is fundamentally different from how people sensed in the past, based on factors such as location and context. He argues that presentations of sensory history such as living museums undermine the integrity of sensory history, as they suggest that a person is able to experience the past in the same way that those who lived the experience did, regardless of their fundamentally different contexts and places unnecessary importance on the 'consumption' of the past. However, more recent work by William Tullett has argued that using our senses in the present to engage with sensory reconstructions of the past can be a useful comparative exercise that sheds light on the continuities and differences between contemporary and past sensory experiences. +Another significant debate in relation to sensory history is the relevance of the 'great divide' theory, as presented in The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan, to the study of sensory history. Sensory historians give varying degrees of importance to this theory. + +== The senses == + +=== Touch === +Touch has historically been included as one of the 'lower' senses, that is, not requiring any skill of the mind to be used. German naturalist Lorenz Oken characterised Africans as the uncivilised "skin-man," as opposed to the civilised European "eye-man," thus utilising touch to support racist ideology. As a result of this view of touch as a 'lower' and 'uncivilised' sense, serious historical analysis of the role touch has played in the past was lacking until the end of the 20th century, when interest in sensory history first 'boomed'. Histories of touch naturally lend themselves to a history of sexuality, but touch is also central to histories of Christian practices. For example, in renaissance and early modern England debates ranged from the role of the kiss in Christian practices to the legitimacy of the 'royal touch', which was reputed to heal the sick. Additionally, the sense of touch is such an integral part of everyday life and experience that it is not often referred to explicitly in historical sources, and so is an "inferred history" as named by historian Constance Classen. + +=== Hearing === +One of the first sensory histories dealing with the sense of hearing is Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-century French Countryside by Alain Corbin, which examines the meanings embedded in the sound of bells in 19th century French villages. The study of cities, particularly with regards to industrialisation, is a common topic of histories of sound or hearing. For example, the term 'soundscape' often refers to both the sounds of the physical environment inhabited, and how these sounds are perceived, especially in regard to how the soundscapes of certain cities change, and how this change affects its citizens. This necessarily draws upon inter-disciplinary research in the fields of soundscapes, sound studies and urban history. The historian Mark M. Smith has suggested the term "acoustemology" as a title for this field of study. Of particular importance in this topic is the invention of recording methods, which some historians have argued was a pivotal turning point in the history of the sense of hearing and radically changed society's relationship with the sense of hearing. Scholars such as Jonathan Sterne, have offered a critique of this narrative by showing that many new forms of listening associated with recording and playback technologies preceded the invention and popularisation of recorded sound. Additionally, how people's relative perception and sensitivity to sound has changed is of particular interest. The focus of this research has been on the regulation of, campaigning against, and association of social groups with urban noise. + +=== Smell === +Perfumer Eugène Rimmel stated in the 19th century that "the history of perfume is, in some manner, that of civilisation." Rarely has the sense of smell been given any prominence in the study of history, which partly stems from the difficulty the English language poses in describing olfactory sensations. Aristotle first pointed this out in De Anima, and it is continually seen in the reliance upon words related to flavour when describing smells. A more common description of smells is simply distinguishing whether the smell is pleasurable or not. Smell is historically considered one of the ‘lower’ senses (like touch and taste) as it is linked to animals who often have a keener sense of smell than humans. The sense of smell is also generally considered to be an undervalued sense, particularly in Western societies. This perspective also stems somewhat from the philosopher Immanual Kant who stated that it was the "least rewarding" and "most easily dispensable sense." In Alain Corbin's book The Foul and the Fragrant, he argues that the sense of smell is inherently tied to social power, as historically certain groups of people have been rendered as 'lesser' because of lack of hygiene. + +=== Taste === +The history of taste is traditionally tied to food history and food studies, however sensory histories of taste attempt to analyse this sense throughout history more broadly and to expand beyond gastronomy. As the sense of taste is intrinsically connected to the act of eating, so the history of taste is necessarily tied to morality and the sin of gluttony, and also therefore the history of the Christian church. Taste is historically considered a lower sense, particularly as it requires physical contact with the subject of the tasting. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3b9c487cc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Sensory history" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_history" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:59.829274+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Sight === +Sight has historically been considered one of the 'higher' senses as it is linked to reading and use of the mind. It has also been associated with the higher classes of society whose jobs do not involve manual labour, as opposed to the lower classes who have even been referred to as simply "hands". This is also reflected in the use of the term 'Dark Ages' and the 'Enlightenment' to describe the period of history in which minimal progress was made as opposed to the period when the foundations of modern thought were built. Due to this supposed supremacy, particularly within the sensory hierarchy of the west, there is no dearth of visual analysis in the practice of traditional history writing. Visual sources such as photographs and paintings are frequently utilised as important sources in historical works. In his essay, When Seeing Makes Scents, Mark M. Smith argues that these visual sources can be mined for information about the other four senses in order to gain a more complete understanding of past sensory experiences. + +== Significant works == +In the ‘boom’ of sensory history during the late 20th and early 21st century, many significant works have been produced within the field of sensory history. Historian Mark M. Smith has written the introductory book Sensory History and a sensory history of the American Civil War in The Smell of Battle and the Taste of Siege. A series of books titled The Cultural History of the Senses surveys the role the five senses has played from antiquity to the modern age through a variety of essays on the subject. Additionally in Empire of the Senses: a Cultural Reader, David Howes has selected essays which represent a large cross-section of the field. For the renewal of food history that goes beyond taste to embrace the other senses, see Vabre, Bruegel, Atkins (2021). + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..75fe3c3a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +title: "Shadows of the Mind" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:26.935830+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness is a 1994 book by mathematical physicist Roger Penrose that serves as a followup to his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics. +Penrose hypothesizes that: + +Human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modelled by a conventional Turing machine type of digital computer. +Quantum mechanics plays an essential role in the understanding of human consciousness; specifically, he believes that microtubules within neurons support quantum superpositions. +The objective collapse of the quantum wavefunction of the microtubules is critical for consciousness. +The collapse in question is physical behaviour that is non-algorithmic and transcends the limits of computability. +The human mind has abilities that no Turing machine could possess because of this mechanism of non-computable physics. + +== Argument == + +=== Mathematical thought === + +In 1931, the mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel proved his incompleteness theorems, showing that any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. Further to that, for any consistent formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. The essence of Penrose's argument is that while a formal proof system cannot, because of the theorem, prove its own incompleteness, Gödel-type results are provable by human mathematicians. He takes this disparity to mean that human mathematicians are not describable as formal proof systems and are not running an algorithm, so that the computational theory of mind is false, and computational approaches to artificial general intelligence are unfounded. (The argument was first given by Penrose in The Emperor's New Mind (1989) and is developed further in Shadows of The Mind. An earlier version of the argument was given by J. R. Lucas in 1959. For this reason, the argument is sometimes called the Penrose-Lucas argument.) + +=== Objective reduction === + +Penrose's theory of Objective Reduction predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Penrose proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference in space-time curvature reaches a significant level. This idea is inspired by quantum gravity, because it uses both the physical constants + + + + + ℏ + + + + {\displaystyle \scriptstyle \hbar } + + and + + + + + G + + + + {\displaystyle \scriptstyle G} + +. It is an alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation, which posits that superposition fails under observation, and the many-worlds hypothesis, which states that each alternative outcome of a superposition becomes real in a separate world. +Penrose's idea is a type of objective collapse theory. In these theories the wavefunction is a physical wave, which undergoes wave function collapse as a physical process, with observers playing no special role. Penrose theorises that the wave function cannot be sustained in superposition beyond a certain energy difference between the quantum states. He gives an approximate value for this difference: a Planck mass worth of matter, which he calls the "'one-graviton' level". +He then hypothesizes that this energy difference causes the wave function to collapse to a single state, with a probability based on its amplitude in the original wave function, a procedure taken from standard quantum mechanics. + +=== Orchestrated objective reduction === + +When he wrote his first consciousness book, The Emperor's New Mind in 1989, Penrose lacked a detailed proposal for how such quantum processes could be implemented in the brain. Subsequently, Stuart Hameroff read The Emperor's New Mind and suggested to Penrose that microtubules within brain cells were suitable candidate sites for quantum processing and ultimately for consciousness. The Orch-OR theory arose from the cooperation of these two scientists and was developed in Penrose's second consciousness book Shadows of the Mind (1994). +Hameroff's contribution to the theory derived from studying brain cells (neurons). His interest centred on the cytoskeleton, which provides an internal supportive structure for neurons, and particularly on the microtubules, which are the important component of the cytoskeleton. As neuroscience has progressed, the role of the cytoskeleton and microtubules has assumed greater importance. In addition to providing a supportive structure for the cell, the known functions of the microtubules include transport of molecules, including neurotransmitter molecules bound for the synapses, and control of the cell's movement, growth and shape. + +== Criticism == + +=== Gödelian argument and nature of human thought === +Penrose's views on the human thought process are not widely accepted in certain scientific circles (Drew McDermott, David Chalmers and others). According to Marvin Minsky, because people can construe false ideas to be factual, the process of thinking is not limited to formal logic. Further, AI programs can also conclude that false statements are true, so error is not unique to humans. +In May 1995, Stanford mathematician Solomon Feferman attacked Penrose's approach on multiple grounds, including the mathematical validity of his Gödelian argument and theoretical background. In 1996, Penrose offered a consolidated reply to many of the criticisms of "Shadows". +John Searle criticises Penrose's appeal to Gödel as resting on the fallacy that all computational algorithms must be capable of mathematical description. As a counter-example, Searle cites the assignment of license plate numbers (LPN) to specific vehicle identification numbers (VIN), to register a vehicle. According to Searle, no mathematical function can be used to connect a known VIN with its LPN, but the process of assignment is quite simple—namely, "first come, first served"—and can be performed entirely by a computer. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..54574ab34 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Shadows of the Mind" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:27:26.935830+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Microtubule hypothesis === +Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed the Orch-OR theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules. However, in 2000, Max Tegmark calculated in an article he published in Physical Review E that the time scale of neuron firing and excitations in microtubules is slower than the decoherence time by a factor of at least 1010. Tegmark's article has been widely cited by critics of the Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis. The reception of the article is summed up by this statement in his support: "Physicists outside the fray, such as IBM's John Smolin, say the calculations confirm what they had suspected all along. 'We're not working with a brain that's near absolute zero. It's reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior', he says." In other words, there is a missing link between physics and neuroscience, and to date, it is too premature to claim that the Orch-OR hypothesis is right. +In response to Tegmark's claims, Hagan, Tuszynski and Hameroff claimed that Tegmark did not address the Orch-OR model, but instead a model of his own construction. This involved superpositions of quanta separated by 24 nm rather than the much smaller separations stipulated for Orch-OR. As a result, Hameroff's group claimed a decoherence time seven orders of magnitude greater than Tegmark's, although still far below 25 ms. Hameroff's group also suggested that the Debye layer of counterions could screen thermal fluctuations, and that the surrounding actin gel might enhance the ordering of water, further screening noise. They also suggested that incoherent metabolic energy could further order water, and finally that the configuration of the microtubule lattice might be suitable for quantum error correction, a means of resisting quantum decoherence. +In 2007, Gregory S. Engel claimed that all arguments concerning the brain being "too warm and wet" have been dispelled, as multiple "warm and wet" quantum processes have been discovered. + +== See also == +Alan Turing, creator of the Turing test +Quantum mind + +== Notes and references == + +This article includes text originally by Philip Dorrell which is licensed under the GFDL \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivkar_Bapuji_Talpade-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivkar_Bapuji_Talpade-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d3c9046dc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivkar_Bapuji_Talpade-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Shivkar Bapuji Talpade" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivkar_Bapuji_Talpade" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:55.285345+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade () was an Indian instructor with an interest in Sanskrit and aviation. He lived in Mumbai, and is claimed to have constructed and flown an unmanned, heavier-than-air aircraft in 1895. Contemporary accounts of a successful flight do not exist, and no reliable historical records document its existence. Pseudo-historical narratives about Talpade proliferated in India in the early 2000s among adherents of the Hindu-nationalist right-wing. These included the false claim that Talpade had "invented the modern aircraft". + + +== Talpade's aircraft == +Talpade is claimed to have constructed an unmanned, heavier-than-air aircraft, named Marutsakhā ("friend of the air"), and flown it above Bombay's Chowpatty Beach in 1895. Contemporary accounts of a successful flight do not exist, and no reliable historical records document its existence. +Talpade's aircraft was reputed to have flown to a height of 1,500 feet (460 m). Pratap Velkar, a local architect who has researched Talpade's life and written a book about him, denies this, stating that it rose to a small height before crashing. The aircraft has been described as a cylinder of bamboo, with claims it used mercury or urine as a fuel. Some of Talpade's drawings were said to have been sent to Hindustan Aeronautics (HAL), but Anuradha Reddy, a historian of aviation, was unable to trace them. The aircraft itself has been described as being sold to Rallis Brothers, or to HAL. Some accounts of the event stated that the flight was watched by Sayajirao Gaekwad III, then the Maharaja of Baroda, but direct evidence for this is scant. Velkar states that no royals attended, as it was not well-publicized. +Some versions of the story say that Talpade had advice from Subbaraya Shastry (1866 - 1940), who later wrote Vaimānika Shāstra ("Science of Aeronautics"), a text that is frequently associated with descriptions of aircraft in the Vedas. Shastry claimed the text was delivered to him psychically and was thousands of years old. A 1974 paper by scientists from the Indian Institute of Science declared that the designs in the Vaimānika Shāstra itself were technologically unfeasible, stating that the text showed a "complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of the flight of heavier-than-air craft". The study also stated that elements of the text were "entirely modern", and that it was definitively not vedic in origin. Shastry himself in his autobiography states that Talpade attempted to construct models of aircraft under Shastry's guidance but was unsuccessful in making any of them fly. + + +== Cultural legacy == +Narratives about the event proliferated in the early 2000s among adherents of the nationalist right-wing. The absence of evidence of its construction is attributed to censorship by the British Raj. Talpade developed a reputation as the "first man to fly an aircraft", given that his achievement was supposed to have taken place eight years before the Wright Brothers flew their plane in 1903. The aircraft attributed to Talpade was unmanned: unmanned aircraft were already in existence at that time, and were flown successfully decades before Talpade's birth. The first such flight was by English engineer John Stringfellow, whose craft flew about thirty yards in 1848. +A film based on life of Talpade, Hawaizaada, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, was released on 30 January 2015. The government of Uttar Pradesh exempt the film from taxes in that state. The film states that Talpade had accomplished in 1895 what the Wright Brothers did in 1903. The Hindi News channel Zee News aired a piece titled "Wright brothers wrong thhe" (the Wright brothers were wrong). The segment claimed that Talpade's craft was the first modern aircraft in the world, and that it was the first drone. Also in 2015, a controversial paper presented at the Indian Science Congress claimed that Talpade had "invented the modern aircraft". Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, a scientist working for NASA, described the paper as pseudoscience. + + +== See also == +Claims to the first powered flight + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0524d607c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Shrink ray" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:22.806339+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In science fiction, a shrink ray is any device which uses energy to reduce the physical size of matter. Many are also capable of enlarging items as well. A growth ray typically only has the ability to enlarge. + +== Scientific == +Science fiction writer and polymath Isaac Asimov wrote: Miniaturization doesn't actually make sense unless you miniaturize the very atoms which build up matter. Otherwise a tiny brain in a human the size of an insect, composed of normal atoms, is composed of too few atoms for the miniaturized human to be any more intelligent than the insect. Also, miniaturizing atoms is impossible according to the rules of quantum mechanics. +Depending on how those atoms were supposed to have been miniaturized, a miniature human may or may not weigh as much as they originally did, which is an observation that has been used for various effects over the years in fictions such as comic books. +However, the problems of a miniature human don't stop there. Basic geometry governs parameters such as relationships between cross-sectional area, volume, and surface area. It may be impossible for a one-inch high human to kill themselves in a fall of any conceivable height, but they may be able to drown themselves with a single drop of water. + +== Appearances in popular culture == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a17370055 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +--- +title: "Shrink ray" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:22.806339+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Films and television === +Dr. Cyclops from the 1940 horror film of that name shrank his victims by locking them inside an "atomic generator". In the 1958 movie Attack of the Puppet People, a scientist captures people and shrinks them to 6 inches in height with an ultrasonic wave device, so he can keep them as company. (He keeps them sealed inside special suspended animation canisters between "puppet shows".) +The 1966 science-fiction film Fantastic Voyage (written by Harry Kleiner, novelization by Isaac Asimov) is plotted around such a device, allowing the miniaturized submarine Proteus to carry a crew inside a stricken scientist in an attempt to save his life. They have one hour to cure him before they expand back to normal size. Dr. Shrinker was a segment that aired 16 episodes as part of the ABC network's The Krofft Supershow in 1976. Dr. Shrinker (Jay Robinson) is an evil scientist with a lab on an uncharted island. When teenagers Brad, B.J., and Gordie are stranded on the island, Dr. Shrinker subjects them to his shrinker machine. They manage to escape the lab in miniature form; the series follows their adventures as they try to evade the clutches of the mad scientist and his assistant Hugo (Billy Barty). In the episode "The Big Break-In" of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated TV series, Krang uses a remote-controlled minimizer device with a shrink ray to shrink down US Army bases, preventing them from attacking the Technodrome. In the episode "Funny, They Shrunk Michelangelo" of the same TV series captain Talbot Breech uses a miniaturizing ray to shrink US naval ships and put them into bottles as revenge on those who turned him down for the US Naval Academy. The same show also features the episode "Poor Little Rich Turtle" features Shredder using a shrink ray on the girl Buffy Shellhammer, who despite her young age runs a company, to force her telling a super rocket fuel formula her grandfather told her before he died. In The Penguins of Madagascar episode "Jiggles", Kowalski uses his shrink ray to shrink Jiggles to normal size. In an episode "Getting Antsy" of the 1991 Darkwing Duck cartoon, a villain Lilliput uses the ray to shrink buildings and landmarks of the fictional city St. Canard. He then employs ants to haul the shrunken buildings to a miniature golf, where they become part of the course. Eventually, Lilliput also shrinks the hero Darkwing Duck to an even tinier size. In an episode of Codename: Kids Next Door, titled Operation: M.I.N.I.G.O.L.F., after Numbuh 2 bests champion golfer, Rupert Putkin, in a game of mini-golf, Rupert seeks revenge. He builds a shrink ray to shrink down the world's greatest monuments and uses them in his own miniature-golf course. Afterwards, he shrinks Numbuh 2 and forces him to play a rematch in his smaller height. Later, Rupert plans to use Numbuh 2 as the golfball as he hits him into a hole that will activate his shrink ray to shrink the world. His plan fails when he misses and Numbuh 2 hits the reverse setting on the shrink ray, which zaps Rupert and makes him grow bigger, causing him to step on and crush his golf course. The shrink ray is destroyed subsequently, but Numbuh 2 remains tiny. He runs back to his friends in the treehouse, and they use him for ping-pong. In another episode of Kids Next Door, entitled "Operation: S.P.R.O.U.T.", when Numbuh 4 swallows a Brussels sprout, supposedly to make him an adult faster, his friends at Sector V take action. Numbuhs 1, 2, and 5 use a shrink ray to shrink down to the size of a booger. Afterwards, Numbuh 3 places them inside of Numbuh 4's nose, and they make their way to the stomach to recover the Brussels sprout, before the shrink effect wears off. They are able to retrieve the massive sprout and make it out of Numbuh 4's body just before they re-expand to normal size. In the aftermath, Numbuh 4 returns home and accidentally eats liver, implying that they have to go on the same mission again. In the TV series, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, one of Jimmy's most-used inventions is his shrink ray, first introduced in his film in which he shrank himself in order to sneak out of his house. In the 1996 Tim Burton's movie, Mars Attacks, the Martian Leader uses a shrinking ray to shrink and crush the President of the United States' main general, General Decker. In "In the Belly of the Boss", the third segment of The Simpsons Halloween special episode "Treehouse of Horror XV", the Simpson family is shrunk by Professor Frink, the entire segment being a parody of the aforementioned Fantastic Voyage. A shrink ray invented by Professor Wayne Szalinski is featured throughout the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise, and is the primary invention used throughout. Not only could it shrink people or other objects, but it could also reverse the effect to bring them back to normal size. In a 1995 episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers called "No Small Problem", Dr. Blight invents a shrinking ray which Sly Sludge uses to shrink rubbish. In an episode of Home Improvement, Tim and Al shrink themselves using shrink rays to work deep inside of the engine. In Doctor Who, the Master uses a Tissue Compression Eliminator to shrink and kill people. The Lilo & Stitch franchise has featured several instances of shrink rays: +In Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Dr. Jumba Jookiba has a "reducer ray" that can shrink objects. This device is used in "Poxy" to shrink Lilo and Stitch in the X-Buggy to get into Pleakley to retrieve a microscopic experiment (Experiment 222/Poxy) that makes people ill. Gantu is also shrunk down by the same device in the episode. In "Short Stuff", a different device called the "Protoplasmic Growth Ray" is used to enlarge Stitch to become big enough to ride a roller coaster, but he's accidentally made gigantic and thus too big to ride the coaster. The episode's experiment (Experiment 297/Shortstuff) is also enlarged by the device, getting into a fight and winning against Stitch (who was enlarged even further to try to defeat him) at the fair. Stitch is brought back to his regular size to defeat the experiment. Gantu also used the device to enlarge Experiment 625 to get him to crush Lilo, Stitch, Jumba, and Pleakley, but 625 shows no interest in them and instead uses his enlarged size to eat the world's largest sandwich. Two episodes of the anime spin-off series Stitch! feature Experiment 001/Shrink, an experiment first introduced in the Lilo & Stitch: The Series finale film Leroy & Stitch (as a cameo) as a rare example of a living creature (albeit an artificial lifeform) being a shrink ray. In the episode "Shrink", the experiment shrinks several characters to a smaller size until he returns them to their regular sizes, although at the end of the episode he instead grows the alien insect BooGoo to become larger than the planet Earth. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e8df74bcc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +--- +title: "Shrink ray" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:22.806339+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In "Experiment-a-palooza", Shrink grows Stitch into a giant; the latter goes on a rampage—as he has also reverted to his former destructive programming thanks to the abilities of Experiment 210/Retro—until Yuna manages to calm him down. In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Unremarkable Voyage", Frylock builds a shrink ray (which can also enlarge items). Master Shake quickly gains control of the machine and proceeds to abuse its power for his own benefit. The shrink ray turns out to be faulty, however, as shrunken items return to normal size after a period of time. A shrink ray is a recurring device shown in Venture Brothers, although it never seems to actually work properly. In Despicable Me, Gru used a shrink ray to shrink the Moon and pocket it. The effects of the shrink ray are only temporary, however, and the bigger the mass of an object, the quicker the effect wears off; this is called the "Nefario Principle" (coined after Gru's scientist assistant Dr. Nefario). Vector returns the Moon to satellite orbit before it returns to normal size using his escape pod, but the Moon expands before he could do so in time and his escape pod is consequently destroyed, trapping him and a Minion on the now normal-sized Moon. In Innerspace, a naval aviator is selected as a guinea pig to participate in a project which places him in a submersible pod to be shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of a rabbit. In Gravity Falls, Dipper Pines was teased by his twin Mabel for being slightly shorter than her, so he finds a crystal that he attaches to a flashlight. One side enlarges things and the other shrinks things. It falls into Gideon's hands until the twins stop Gideon from shrinking Grunkle Stan and taking the Mystery Shack. In Dragon Ball, a Micro Band invented by Bulma can shrink its wearer. Also, a portable home called a Capsule House can be carried around in a capsule and deployed when desired. In the episode "The Sound of Fear" from the Monsters vs. Aliens TV series, Dr. Crockroach uses a shrink gun to shrink Susan. After a few minutes, she is back to normal. In an episode of Phineas and Ferb, Dr. Doofinshmirtz shrinks himself but misses his hand. Phineas and Ferb have also shrunk themselves twice. In the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse episode entitled "The Shrinkerator", Ken builds a shrink ray and accidentally shrinks Barbie and Raquelle. In the WordGirl episode entitled "Shrinkin' in the Ray", Dr. Too-Brains uses a shrink ray to shrink cheese and shrunk Scoops and WordGirl. In The Electric Company episode "Shrink, Shrank, Shrunk", Manny uses a "shrinkinator" to shrink the water bottle and the car but accidentally shrinks Jessica, Marcus, and himself instead. In the end, they return to normal size. In the sixth season of Archer, episodes "Drastic Voyage: Part I" and "Drastic Voyage: Part II" involve a CIA-developed machine which can perform "molecular miniaturization" and which is essentially a shrink ray. The episodes both parody and reference Fantastic Voyage. In Mickey Mouse episode called "Down the Hatch", Mickey and Goofy get trapped inside Donald's body after they accidentally get shrunken down from a shrink ray to miniature proportions. In the episode "Incredible Shrinking Cat" from The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, Tom and Jerry end up in a scientist's laboratory where they discover a shrink and growth ray, which is used on Tom. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fdc6d528c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Shrink ray" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_ray" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:22.806339+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Radio === +The "Pertwee System of Infinite Acceleration" in the Dimension X episode "The Professor Was a Thief" was a shrink ray (November 5, 1950). + +=== Literature === +Cold War in a Country Garden (Lindsay Gutteridge, Pocket 1973) concerns the adventures of miniaturized spies. +Small World (Tabitha King, 1982) is about a dollhouse enthusiast who gains a device that will shrink anything, and takes it too far. +The Atom, Ant-Man, The Wasp, and Doll Man are but a few of the comic book characters who had as a primary power the ability to shrink (usually by technological means). + +=== Video games === +Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever have a shrink ray capable of shrinking an enemy, which allows the player character Duke Nukem to step on the shrunken foe, instantly killing it. A similar weapon dubbed the G.L.O.P.P. Ray appears in Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project. +Engineers in World of Warcraft are capable of crafting a Gnomish shrink ray. +The Eiffel Tower is reduced in size, then stolen, in the game Evil Genius. +In Men in Black: The Series – Crashdown, Agent J uses a shrink ray to shrink himself and battle a group of insectoid aliens. +Pandemonium! features a shrink ray power-up. +Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombie mode includes weapon called 31-79JGb215, which reduces zombies' size for a short amount of time so they can be instantly killed with any weapon, or even by running towards them, although this weapon is only seen in the map Shangri-La. +The game Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters features a shrink ray item, which Ratchet uses to enter keyholes and unlock them. + +=== Other === +The term "grocery shrink ray" has been used to describe a manufacturer decreasing the amount of product in a package while keeping the package price the same, as a scheme to implement a hidden price increase. + +== See also == +Raygun +Size change in fiction + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize-0.md index 84a3a6503..bfc6c46a0 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Edelstein_Prize" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:49:32.415872+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:23.897365+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_in_the_Cell-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_in_the_Cell-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..68bd4aff2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_in_the_Cell-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Signature in the Cell" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_in_the_Cell" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:24.255967+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is a 2009 book about intelligent design by philosopher and intelligent design advocate Stephen C. Meyer. The book was well received by some within the conservative, intelligent design and evangelical communities, but several other reviewers were critical and wrote that Meyer's claims are incorrect. + + +== Summary == +According to Meyer, historical sciences seek to establish past causes of events using three criteria: (1) that a proposed cause was present, (2) that independent evidence establishes that the proposed cause can indeed produce that event, and (3) that there is an absence of evidence of other possible causes. In his view, the first form of life would have been a functioning, self-replicating, and protein-synthesizing system of DNA and proteins, and as such an information-rich system. Meyer believes that chemical evolution, chance, and chemical necessity have not been proven capable of producing information-rich systems, and that intelligent design is therefore the best explanation for the emergence of life on this planet. He argues that definitions of science that would preclude intelligent design from being a science also preclude many other fields, already established as science, from being science. Meyer believes the designing mind is the God described by the Christian religion. He acknowledges that this may affect the motivations behind his theory. + + +== Reception == +The book has been well received by some within the conservative, intelligent design and evangelical communities. It was not reviewed by scientific journals or popular science magazines. +Philosopher Thomas Nagel submitted the book to the "2009 Books of the Year" supplement for The Times. Stephen Fletcher, chemist at Loughborough University, responded in The Times Literary Supplement that Nagel was "promot[ing] the book to the rest of us using statements that are factually incorrect." Fletcher explained that, "Natural selection is in fact a chemical process as well as a biological process, and it was operating for about half a billion years before the earliest cellular life forms appear in the fossil record." In another publication, Fletcher wrote that "I am afraid that reality has overtaken Meyer’s book and its flawed reasoning" in pointing out scientific problems with Meyer's work by citing how RNA "survived and evolved into our own human protein-making factory, and continues to make our fingers and toes." +Darrel Falk, co-president of the BioLogos Foundation and a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, reviewed the book and used it as an example of why he does not support the intelligent design movement. In 2010 the BioLogos Foundation published Meyer's response to Falk. The response criticizes Falk's characterization of Meyer's credentials as well as the lack of any evidence from Falk that the premise of his book is faulty. +The American Scientific Affiliation, a Christian organization of scientists and others, published a detailed analysis of the book's assertions by their executive director, physicist Randall Isaac. +Steve Matheson, a developmental biologist at Calvin College (an institution of the Christian Reformed Church), wrote an analysis critical of the book. In a post on The Panda's Thumb, Richard Hoppe concluded that the book failed to make a strong case for ID. +The Discovery Institute published a collection of responses to critics edited by David Klinghoffer. + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Signature in the Cell +Seeking a Signature, a review of Signature in the Cell appearing in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8ccededf4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ +--- +title: "Silva Method" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silva_Method" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:25.454293+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Silva Method is a self-help and meditation program developed by José Silva. It claims to increase an individual's abilities through relaxation, improve the intelligence quotient, use the mind to heal the body, develop higher brain functions, and psychic abilities such as clairvoyance. +It has been variously classified as a self-religion, a new religious movement, and a cult, and has been criticised as pseudoscience. + + +== Biography of José Silva == +José Silva (August 11, 1914- February 7, 1999), an American electronics repairman, grew up in Laredo, Texas. He developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children's IQ. After experimenting and being convinced of his daughter's sudden clairvoyance, Silva decided to learn more about the development of psychic abilities. +In 1944 Silva began developing his method, formerly known as Silva Mind Control. He used it on his family members and friends before launching it commercially in the 1960s. +Silva was the subject of a 1990 biography. + + +== Technique == +The technique aims to reach and sustain a state of mental functioning, called alpha state, where brainwave frequency is seven to fourteen Hz.:p19-20 Daydreaming and the transition to sleeping are alpha states.:p19-20 +Silva claimed to have developed a program that trained people to enter certain brain states of enhanced awareness. He also claimed to have developed several systematic mental processes to use while in these states allowing a person to mentally project with a specific intent. According to Silva, once the mind is projected, a person can allegedly view distant objects or locations and connect with higher intelligence for guidance. The information received by the projected mind is then said to be perceived as thoughts, images, feelings, smells, taste, and sound by the mind. The information obtained in this manner can be acted upon to solve problems. + + +== Skepticism == +James Randi wrote of the Silva Method: + +A system developed by José Silva (1914- ) that claims to develop improved memory, learning ability, and paranormal powers like telepathy. Much of the course consists of 'visiting' absent persons imagined by students and performing diagnoses on them. No tests of the validity of this practice have been done; such tests are discouraged by the teachers of the system. + + +== See also == +Autosuggestion +Extra-sensory perception +Visualization +Remote viewing +Samyama +Self-help + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Silva Method Case Working Site +The Silva Method official website +The Silva Method Official Partners \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinodonty_and_Sundadonty-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinodonty_and_Sundadonty-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..49690a2a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinodonty_and_Sundadonty-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +title: "Sinodonty and Sundadonty" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinodonty_and_Sundadonty" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:27.772349+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In anthropology, Sinodonty and Sundadonty are two patterns of features widely found in the dentitions of the populations of East Asia and Southeast Asia respectively. These two patterns were identified by anthropologist Christy G. Turner II as being within the greater "Mongoloid dental complex". +The combining forms Sino- and Sunda- refer to China and Sundaland, respectively, while -dont refers to teeth. + + +== Proto-sundadonty hypothesis == +Tsunehiko Hanihara (1993) believed that the dental features of Aboriginal Australians have the characteristic of high frequencies of "evolutionarily conservative characteristics," which he called the "proto-sundadont" pattern, as he believed that the dental pattern of Aboriginal Australians was ancestral to that of Southeast Asians. +C.G Turner II, in his 2016 analysis, that sundadonty is the proto-East Eurasian dental morphology and is not connected to the Australian dental morphology, rendering the term "proto-sundadont" inaccurate for the Australian dental morphology. He also shows that sinodonty is predominant in Native Americans. + + +== Super-Sinodont == +Analysis on the Sinodonty and Sundadonty of New world groups by G.R. Sott et al. (2016) shows the distinction among East Asians is not nearly as dramatic as the difference between all Asians and all New World groups. Other researchers, such a Stojanowski et al., 2013; +Stojanowski and Johnson, (2015) suggest New World groups may be neither Sinodont nor Sundadont and in most regards, could be viewed as super-Sinodont. A clear dental morphology not only ties New World groups to Asians, particularly northeast Asians, but it also exhibits a pattern largely consistent with the Beringian Standstill model (BSM) based on a Sinodont source population. + + +== Mongoloid dental complex == + +Turner defined the Sinodont and Sundadont dental complexes in contrast to a broader Mongoloid dental complex. Hanihara defined the Mongoloid dental complex in 1966. In 1984, Turner separated the Mongoloid dental complex into the Sinodont and Sundadont dental complexes. +Ryuta Hamada, Shintaro Kondo and Eizo Wakatsuki (1997) said, on the basis of dental traits, that Mongoloids are separated into sinodonts and sundadonts, which is supported by Christy G. Turner II (1989). + + +=== Sundadont === +Turner found the Sundadont pattern in the skeletal remains of Jōmon people of Japan, and in living populations of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, Filipinos, Indonesians, Borneans, and Malays. +In 1996, Rebecca Haydenblit of the Hominid Evolutionary Biology Research Group at Cambridge University did a study on the dentition of four Pre-Columbian era Mesoamerican populations and compared their data to other Eastern Eurasian populations. She found that "Tlatilco", "Cuicuilco", "Monte Albán" and "Cholula" populations followed an overall Sundadont dental pattern "characteristic of Southeast Asia" rather than a Sinodont dental pattern "characteristic of Northeast Asia". +According to a 2016 study, Sundadonty is characterized by an early generalized pattern with simple crown and root traits. + + +=== Sinodont === +Turner found the Sinodont pattern in the Han Chinese, in the inhabitants of Mongolia and eastern Siberia, in the Native Americans, and in the Yayoi people of Japan. +Sinodonty is a particular pattern of teeth characterized by the following features: + +The upper first incisors and upper second incisors are shovel-shaped, and they are "not aligned with the other teeth". +The upper first premolar has one root, and the lower first molar in Sinodonts has three roots (3RM1). + + +==== Associated traits ==== +The EDAR gene causes the Sinodont tooth pattern, and also affects hair texture, jaw morphology, and perhaps the nutritional profile of breast milk. + + +== Applicability == +In the 1990s, Turner's dental morphological traits were frequently mentioned as one of three new tools for studying origins and migrations of human populations. The other two were linguistic methods such as Joseph Greenberg's mass comparison of vocabulary or Johanna Nichols's statistical study of language typology and its evolution, and genetic studies pioneered by Cavalli-Sforza. +Today, the largest number of references to Turner's work are from discussions of the origin of Paleo-Amerindians and modern Native Americans, including the Kennewick Man controversy. Turner found that the dental remains of both ancient and modern Amerindians are more similar to each other than they are to dental complexes from other continents, but that the Sinodont patterns of the Paleo-Amerindians identify their ancestral homeland as north-east Asia. Some later studies have questioned this and found Sundadont features in some American peoples. +A study done by Stojonowski et al in 2015 found a "significant interobserver error" in the earlier studies and their statistical analysis of matched wear and morphology scores suggests trait downgrading for some traits. + + +== See also == + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..63b79dc20 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Sleep-learning" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:28.924790+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Sleep-learning or sleep-teaching (also known as hypnopædia or hypnopedia) is an attempt to convey information to a sleeping person, typically by playing a sound recording to them while they sleep. Although sleep is considered an important period for memory consolidation, scientific research has concluded that sleep-learning is not possible. Once a concept explored in the early history of psychology, sleep-learning appears frequently in fiction and parapsychology, and is widely considered to be pseudoscience. + +== History == +In 1927, Alois Benjamin Saliger invented the "Psycho-Phone" or "Psychophone", a specialized version of Thomas Edison's phonograph, for sleep learning, stating: "It has been proven that natural sleep is identical with hypnotic sleep and that during natural sleep the unconscious mind is most receptive to suggestions." Saliger patented the device in 1932 as the "automatic time-controlled suggestion machine". +Since the electroencephalography studies by Charles W. Simon and William H. Emmons in 1956, learning by sleep has not been taken seriously. The researchers concluded that learning during sleep was "impractical and probably impossible". They reported that stimulus material presented during sleep was not recalled later when the subject awoke, unless alpha wave activity occurred at the same time the stimulus material was given. + +== In fiction == +Sleep-learning is found in influential science fiction and other literature. The following examples are listed chronologically by publication or original air date, when known. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..afd29166e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Sleep-learning" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:28.924790+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In Hugo Gernsback's 1911 story Ralph 124C 41+, one finds the Hypnobioscope, a sleep learning device. +In Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World, it is used for the conditioning of children into the novel's fictional future culture. In the novel, sleep-learning was discovered by accident when a Polish boy named Reuben Rabinovitch was able to recite an entire radio broadcast in English after a radio receiver was left on in his sleep. The boy was unable to comprehend what he had heard via hypnopædia, but it was soon realized that hypnopædia could be used to effectively make suggestions about morality. +In Robert Heinlein's 1948 novel Space Cadet, the character Matt Dodson is taught to speak Venutian (the language of the planet Venus) while under drug-aided hypnosis. He surprises his Venus-born friend Oscar by spontaneously reproving him when Oscar utters a curse in Venutian. (Later in the novel, Matt appears to have forgotten what he learned and relies on Oscar for translation.) +In the BBC Radio series Journey into Space (1953–1958), during the second and third parts of the trilogy, there were said to be Martians abducting people from the Earth and conditioning them to obey instructions or to make them believe things that were not true. The inception of this conditioning involved putting the subject into a hypnotic sleep and appraising them of a certain situation; once they awoke they would believe it, regardless of the validity. +Teaching relatives while they are asleep to influence their waking behavior is at the heart of Guido Martina's and Giovan Battista Carpi's Disney comic story Paperino e la cura suggestiva ("Donald Duck and the Suggestive Cure"), first published in Topolino #187 (May 25, 1958). +In a 1961 episode of My Three Sons, "A Lesson In Any Language", Mike connects a phonograph to an automatic timer to play Spanish lessons while he sleeps. Steve and Bub ultimately end up sleeping in the room and are able to speak fluent Spanish the following day. +In Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, it is used to reverse the effects of the Ludovico Technique, a form of conditioning, which was used on the main character Alex to make him incapable of violent behavior. The conditioning was a new technique which was supposed to rehabilitate violent criminals in a short period of time, but which resulted in Alex attempting suicide. This reflected very badly on the government, which had sanctioned the experiment, so hypnopædia was used to undo the conditioning. +In 1954 Günter Spang wrote a children's book called Lohengrin schwant etwas, meaning Lohengrin has a good idea, in which a bunch of schoolchildren take an easy way out of studying by learning in their sleep. +In a 1963 episode of The Patty Duke Show, "The Conquering Hero", Cathy tries to help a failing basketball player pass a quiz. She suggests that the latest scientific method of "subconscious learning" will help. She records the lessons on a tape which plays repeatedly while he is asleep. He passes the quiz after the answers "come to him" while looking at the questions. +In the 1965 episode of "I Spy" titled Chrysanthemum, the assigned partner of Bill Cosby and Robert Culp's characters, Maximilian de Broget claims to have learned Mandarin Chinese in his sleep. +In the 1965 movie The Monkey's Uncle, a college student connects a phonograph to an automatic timer, which plays to sleeping students the voice of a girl reading their lessons aloud. This backfires in class, however—when asked to give an oral report, the students speak, but in the girl's voice. +In the 1966 novel Flowers for Algernon, an intellectually disabled 37-year-old, Charlie Gordon, has an operation to increase his intelligence. Professor Nemur and Dr. Strauss then give Charlie a "teeching mashine that werks like T.V." Charlie explains to Professor Nemur that "I dint think I was goin to get smart anyway" [sic]. +The 1976 film Logan's Run contains a scene where Logan 5 (Michael York) chastises his friend Francis 7 (Richard Jordan) for his rigidly orthodox opinions, "You sound like a sleep-teacher with a stuck tape". +In a 1988 episode of the BBC2 sitcom Red Dwarf, "Me2", Arnold Rimmer uses sleep-learning tapes such as Learn Esperanto While You Sleep and Learn Quantum Theory While You Sleep, to the dismay of his bunkmate Dave Lister. +In the 1990 movie Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might, Chi-Chi packs for her son Gohan a tape recorder so he can learn while he sleeps on a camping trip. +In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons, "Bart's Friend Falls in Love", Homer orders hypnosis tapes which are supposed to induce weight loss. However, the mail-order company sends him vocabulary builder tapes instead, and Homer gets fatter and fatter while his vocabulary increases, through hypnopædia. +In a 1996 episode of Dexter's Laboratory, "The Big Cheese", Dexter hooks himself up to a gramophone that repeats his lesson for a French class test the next morning. The gramophone gets stuck at the phrase omelette du fromage, and Dexter finds out the next morning that it is all he is capable of saying. +In a 1997 episode of Friends, "The One with the Hypnosis Tape", Chandler borrows from Rachel a smoking-cessation audiocassette, to which he listens while he is asleep. The tape tells him that he is "a strong, confident woman" who does not need to smoke. He stops smoking, but also begins acting effeminately. +In the 1997 PC game Outpost 2: Divided Destiny, one of the items available for research was hypnopædia, which allowed scientists to be trained more quickly. +In a 2001 episode of Homestar Runner, "A Jorb Well Done", Coach Z attempts to overcome his speech impediment with the word "job" (which he pronounces as "jorb"). After unsuccessfully trying several methods, Strong Sad gives him a tape of him repeating the word job thousands of times, "from when (he) was practicing the dictionary". Coach Z takes it home and listens to it while he sleeps, and the next day is able to pronounce "job" correctly, but forgets Homestar's name. +The twins Hank and Dean Venture, of the animated television program The Venture Bros., are homeschooled through the use of hypnopædic beds. + +== See also == +Educational technology +Mozart effect +Nuremberg Funnel +Sleep and learning, the science that ties sleep to learning + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Emmons William, H.; Simon Charles, W. (Mar 1956). "The Non-Recall of Material Presented During Sleep". American Journal of Psychology. 69 (1): 76–81. doi:10.2307/1418117. JSTOR 1418117. PMID 13302501. Archived from the original on 2016-03-03. +Fox, B.H.; Robbin, J.S. (1952). "The Retention of Material Presented During Sleep" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Psychology. 43 (1): 75–79. doi:10.1037/h0057555. PMID 14907994. +Fox, B.H. (1968). Current research in Hypnopaedia. Macdonald & Co. [PDF] +Leshan, L. (1942). "The Breaking of a Habit by Suggestion During Sleep" (PDF). Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology. 37 (3): 406–408. doi:10.1037/h0057703. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-0.md index f1ccbcdff..4da666fcd 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:27.852988+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:30.155436+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-1.md index 65e63f020..1a68d5244 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:27.852988+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:30.155436+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-2.md index 5769fdae2..0b0ccbd23 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:27.852988+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:30.155436+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-3.md index 2dae83a03..3ef30bf71 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/4 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:22:27.852988+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:30.155436+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6a8601e93 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 1/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Social Darwinism is a body of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices that claim to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics. Social Darwinists believe that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Social Darwinist definitions of the strong and the weak vary, and differ on the precise mechanisms that reward strength and punish weakness. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others, emphasizing struggle between national or racial groups, support eugenics, racism, imperialism and/or fascism. Today, scientists generally consider social Darwinism to be discredited as a theoretical framework, but it persists within popular culture. +Scholars debate the extent to which the various social Darwinist ideologies reflect Charles Darwin's own views on human social and economic issues. References to social Darwinism since have usually been pejorative. Some groups, including creationists such as William Jennings Bryan, argued social Darwinism is a logical consequence of Darwinism. Academics such as Steven Pinker have argued this is a fallacy of appeal to nature. While most scholars recognize historical links between the popularisation of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, they generally maintain that social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution. +Social Darwinism declined in popularity following World War I, and its purportedly scientific claims were largely discredited by the end of World War II—partially due to its association with Nazism and due to a growing scientific consensus that eugenics and scientific racism were unfounded. + +== Origin of the term == +The term Darwinism was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in his March 1861 review of On the Origin of Species; by the 1870s, it was used to describe a range of concepts of evolution or development, without any specific commitment to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. +The phrase social Darwinism first appeared in Joseph Fisher's 1877 article on The History of Landholding in Ireland, which was published in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Fisher was commenting on how a system for borrowing livestock called "tenure" had led to the false impression that the early Irish had already evolved or developed land tenure; + +These arrangements did not in any way affect that which we understand by the word "tenure", that is, a man's farm, but they related solely to cattle, which we consider a chattel. It has appeared necessary to devote some space to this subject, inasmuch as that usually acute writer Sir Henry Maine has accepted the word "tenure" in its modern interpretation and has built up a theory under which the Irish chief "developed" into a feudal baron. I can find nothing in the Brehon laws to warrant this theory of social Darwinism, and believe the further study will show that the Cáin Saerrath and the Cáin Aigillne relate solely to what we now call chattels, and did not in any way affect what we now call the freehold, the possession of the land. +Despite the fact that social Darwinism bears Charles Darwin's name, it is primarily linked today with others, notably Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. In fact, Spencer was not described as a social Darwinist until the 1930s, long after his death. The term "social Darwinism" first appeared in Europe in 1879, and journalist Émile Gautier had coined the term with reference to a health conference in Berlin 1877. Around 1900 it was used by sociologists, some being opposed to the concept. The American historian Richard Hofstadter popularized the term in the United States in 1944. He used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed that promoted competitive strife, racism, and chauvinism. Hofstadter later also recognized (what he saw as) the influence of Darwinist and other evolutionary ideas upon those with collectivist views, enough to devise a term for the phenomenon, Darwinist collectivism. Before Hofstadter's work the use of the term "social Darwinism" in English academic journals was quite rare. In fact, + +... there is considerable evidence that the entire concept of "social Darwinism" as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. Eric Foner, in an introduction to a then-new edition of Hofstadter's book published in the early 1990s, declines to go quite that far. "Hofstadter did not invent the term Social Darwinism", Foner writes, "which originated in Europe in the 1860s and crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. But before he wrote, it was used only on rare occasions; he made it a standard shorthand for a complex of late-nineteenth-century ideas, a familiar part of the lexicon of social thought." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dd255d54d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 2/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Usage === +Social Darwinism has many definitions, not all of which are compatible with one another. As such, social Darwinism has been criticized for being an inconsistent philosophy, which does not lead to any clear political conclusions. For example, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics states:Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist. +The term social Darwinism has rarely been used by advocates of the supposed ideologies or ideas; instead it has almost always been used pejoratively by its opponents. The term draws upon the common meaning of Darwinism, which includes a range of evolutionary views, but in the late 19th century was applied more specifically to natural selection as first advanced by Darwin to explain speciation in populations of organisms. The process includes competition between individuals for limited resources, popularly but inaccurately described by the phrase "survival of the fittest", a term coined by sociologist Herbert Spencer. Spencer published his Lamarckian evolutionary ideas about society before Darwin first published his hypothesis in 1859, and Spencer and Darwin promoted their own conceptions of moral values. Spencer supported laissez-faire capitalism on the basis of his Lamarckian belief that struggle for survival spurred self-improvement which could be inherited. +Creationists have often maintained that social Darwinism—leading to policies designed to reward the most competitive—is a logical consequence of "Darwinism" (the theory of natural selection in biology). Biologists and historians have stated that this is a fallacy of appeal to nature and should not be taken to imply that this phenomenon ought to be used as a moral guide in human society. While there are historical links between the popularization of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, most scholars agree that social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution. +Darwin's writings have passages that can be interpreted as opposing aggressive individualism, while other passages appear to promote it. Darwin's early evolutionary views and his opposition to slavery ran counter to many of the claims that social Darwinists would eventually make about the mental capabilities of the poor and indigenous peoples in the European colonies. After publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, one strand of Darwin's followers argued natural selection ceased to have any noticeable effect on humans once organised societies had been formed. However, some scholars argue Darwin's view gradually changed and came to incorporate views from other theorists such as Spencer. +While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species. Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th-century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century. +The massive expansion in Western colonialism during the New Imperialism era fitted in with the broader notion of social Darwinism used from the 1870s onwards to account for the phenomenon of "the Anglo-Saxon and Latin overflowing his boundaries", as phrased by the late-Victorian sociologist Benjamin Kidd in Social Evolution, published in 1894. The concept also proved useful to justify what was seen by some as the inevitable "disappearance" of "the weaker races ... before the stronger" not so much "through the effects of ... our vices upon them" as "what may be called the virtues of our civilisation." Winston Churchill, a political proponent of eugenics, maintained that if fewer "feebleminded" individuals were born, less crime would take place. + +== Proponents == + +Herbert Spencer's ideas, like those of evolutionary progressivism, stemmed from his reading of Thomas Malthus, and his later theories were influenced by those of Darwin. However, Spencer's major work, Progress: Its Law and Cause (1857), was released two years before the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and First Principles was printed in 1860. +In The Social Organism (1860), Spencer compares society to a living organism and argues that, just as biological organisms evolve through natural selection, society evolves and increases in complexity through analogous processes. +In many ways, Spencer's theory of cosmic evolution has much more in common with the works of Lamarck and Auguste Comte's positivism than with Darwin's. +Jeff Riggenbach argues that Spencer's view was that culture and education made a sort of Lamarckism possible and notes that Herbert Spencer was a proponent of private charity. However, the legacy of his social Darwinism was less than charitable. + +Spencer's work also served to renew interest in the work of Malthus. While Malthus's work does not itself qualify as social Darwinism, his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, was incredibly popular and widely read by social Darwinists. In that book, for example, the author argued that as an increasing population would normally outgrow its food supply, this would result in the starvation of the weakest and a Malthusian catastrophe. +According to Michael Ruse, Darwin read Malthus' famous Essay on a Principle of Population in 1838, four years after Malthus' death. Malthus himself anticipated the social Darwinists in suggesting that charity could exacerbate social problems. +Another of these social interpretations of Darwin's biological views, later known as eugenics, was put forth by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in 1865 and 1869. Galton argued that just as physical traits were clearly inherited among generations of people, the same could be said for mental qualities (genius and talent). Galton argued that social morals needed to change so that heredity was a conscious decision, to avoid both the over-breeding by less fit members of society and the under-breeding of the more fit ones. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..63df99880 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 3/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In Galton's view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums were allowing inferior humans to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more "superior" humans in respectable society, and if corrections were not soon taken, society would be awash with "inferiors". Darwin read his cousin's work with interest, and devoted sections of Descent of Man to discussion of Galton's theories. Neither Galton nor Darwin, though, advocated any eugenic policies restricting reproduction, due to their Whiggish distrust of government. +Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy addressed the question of artificial selection, yet Nietzsche's principles did not concur with Darwinian theories of natural selection. Nietzsche's point of view on sickness and health, in particular, opposed him to the concept of biological adaptation as forged by Spencer's "fitness". Nietzsche criticized Haeckel, Spencer, and Darwin, sometimes under the same banner by maintaining that in specific cases, sickness was necessary and even helpful. Thus, he wrote: + +Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race. +Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory was not Darwinism, but rather attempted to combine the ideas of Goethe, Lamarck and Darwin. It was adopted by emerging social sciences to support the concept that non-European societies were "primitive", in an early stage of development towards the European ideal, but since then it has been heavily refuted on many fronts. Haeckel's works led to the formation of the Monist League in 1904 with many prominent citizens among its members, including the Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald. +The simpler aspects of social Darwinism followed the earlier Malthusian ideas that humans, especially males, require competition in their lives to survive. Further, the poor should have to provide for themselves and not be given any aid. However, amidst this climate, most social Darwinists of the early 20th century actually supported better working conditions and salaries. Such measures would grant the poor a better chance to provide for themselves yet still distinguish those who are capable of succeeding from those who are poor out of laziness, weakness, or inferiority. + +== Hypotheses relating social change and evolution == + +One of the earliest uses of the term "social Darwinism" was by Eduard Oscar Schmidt of the University of Strasbourg, when reporting at a scientific and medical conference held in Munich in 1877. He noted how socialists, although opponents of Darwin's theory, used it to add force to their political arguments. Schmidt's essay first appeared in English in Popular Science in March 1879. There followed an anarchist tract published in Paris in 1880 entitled "Le darwinisme social" by Émile Gautier. However, the use of the term was very rare—at least in the English-speaking world —until the American historian Richard Hofstadter published his influential Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) during World War II. +Hypotheses of social evolution and cultural evolution were common in Europe. The Enlightenment thinkers who preceded Darwin, such as Hegel, often argued that societies progressed through stages of increasing development. Earlier thinkers also emphasized conflict as an inherent feature of social life. Thomas Hobbes's 17th-century portrayal of the state of nature seems analogous to the competition for natural resources described by Darwin. Social Darwinism is distinct from other theories of social change because of the way it draws Darwin's distinctive ideas from the field of biology into social studies. +Darwin, unlike Hobbes, believed that this struggle for natural resources allowed individuals with certain physical and mental traits to succeed more frequently than others, and that these traits accumulated in the population over time, which under certain conditions could lead to the descendants being so different that they would be defined as a new species. +However, Darwin felt that "social instincts" such as "sympathy" and "moral sentiments" also evolved through natural selection, and that these resulted in the strengthening of societies in which they occurred, so much so that he wrote about it in Descent of Man: + +The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. + +== Young Turks == +The Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire adopted social Darwinist ideology. Belief that there was a life-or-death conflict between Turks and other ethnicities motivated them to carry out genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Armenians. Social Darwinism enabled them to view extermination of entire population groups and the murder of women and children as a necessary and justified course of action. + +== Nazi Germany == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ba6ef4501 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 4/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Nazi Germany's justification for its aggression was regularly promoted in Nazi propaganda films depicting scenes such as beetles fighting in a lab setting to demonstrate the principles of 'survival of the fittest' as depicted in Alles Leben ist Kampf (English translation: All Life is Struggle). Hitler often refused to intervene in the promotion of officers and staff members, preferring instead to have them fight amongst themselves to force the "stronger" person to prevail—"strength" referring to those social forces void of virtue or principle. One key proponent was Alfred Rosenberg, who was hanged later at Nuremberg. Such ideas also helped to advance mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Germany, especially Aktion T4, which targeted mentally ill and disabled people in Germany. +The argument that Nazi ideology was strongly influenced by social Darwinist ideas is often found in historical and social science literature. For example, the philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt analysed the historical development via social Darwinist ethics to racist ideology. +Another example is recent scholarship that portrays Ernst Haeckel's Monist League as a mystical progenitor of the Völkisch movement and, ultimately, of the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. Scholars opposed to this interpretation, however, have pointed out that the Monists were freethinkers who opposed all forms of mysticism, and that their organizations were immediately banned following the Nazi takeover in 1933 because of their association with a wide variety of causes including feminism, pacifism, human rights, and early gay rights movements. + +== Other regional distributions == + +=== United States === +Within American society, ideas of social Darwinism reached their greatest prominence during the Gilded Age. Some argue that the rationale of the late 19th-century "captains of industry" such as John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) owed much to social Darwinism, and that monopolists of this type applied Darwin's concept of natural selection to explain corporate dominance in their respective fields and thus to justify their exorbitant accumulations of success and social advancement. Rockefeller, for example, proclaimed: "The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest ... the working out of a law of nature and a law of God." Robert Bork (1927–2012) backed this notion of inherent characteristics as the sole determinant of survival in the business-operations context when he said: "In America, the rich are overwhelmingly people—entrepreneurs, small-business men, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, etc.—who have gained their higher incomes through intelligence, imagination, and hard work." Moreover, William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) lauded this same cohort of magnates, and further extended the theory of "corporate Darwinism". Sumner argued that societal progress depended on the "fittest families" passing down wealth and genetic traits to their offspring, thus allegedly creating a lineage of superior citizens. However, contemporary social scientists reject such claims and have understood that economic status is largely a result of other factors. +In 1883 Sumner published a highly-influential pamphlet entitled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other", in which he insisted that the social classes owe each other nothing, synthesizing Darwin's findings with free-enterprise capitalism for his justification. According to Sumner, those who feel an obligation to provide assistance to those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for resources, will lead to a country in which the weak and inferior are encouraged to breed more like themselves, eventually dragging the country down. Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for existence was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival. This pamphlet makes no mention of Darwinism, and only refers to Darwin in a statement on the meaning of liberty, that "There never has been any man, from the primitive barbarian up to a Humboldt or a Darwin, who could do as he had a mind to." +Sumner never fully embraced Darwinian ideas, and some contemporary historians do not believe that Sumner ever actually believed in social Darwinism. The great majority of American businessmen rejected the anti-philanthropic implications of Sumner's theory. Instead they gave millions to build schools, colleges, hospitals, art institutes, parks and many other institutions. Andrew Carnegie, who admired Spencer, was the leading philanthropist in the world in the period from 1890 to 1920, and a major leader against imperialism and warfare. For these and other reasons (such as the general lack of interest in academic pursuits most Gilded Age barons displayed) other writers, such as Irvin G. Wyllie and Thomas C. Leonard, argue that businessmen in the Gilded Age in fact displayed little support for the ideas of social Darwinism. +The Englishman H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was heavily influenced by Darwinist thought, but reacted against social Darwinism. American novelist Jack London (1876–1916) wrote stories of survival that incorporated his views on social Darwinism. American film-director Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) has been described as "just an old-fashioned social Darwinist". +On the basis of U.S. theory and practice, commercial Darwinism operates in markets worldwide, pitting corporation against corporation in struggles for survival. + +=== Japan === + +Social Darwinism has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century. Social Darwinism was originally brought to Japan through the works of Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel as well as United States, British and French Lamarckian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenism as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th century, in Jinsei-Der Mensch, the first eugenics journal in the empire. As Japan sought to close ranks with the west, this practice was adopted wholesale along with colonialism and its justifications. +Social Darwinists in Japan used Arthur de Gobineau's categorizing of the three races as justification for a Japanese imperialism that sought to civilize other peoples of the "yellow" race while avoiding mixing with "white" or "black" races. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..00799c78d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 5/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== China === +Social Darwinism was formally introduced to China through the translation by Yan Fu of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, in the course of an extensive series of translations of influential Western thought. Yan's translation strongly impacted Chinese scholars because he added national elements not found in the original. Yan Fu criticized Huxley from the perspective of Spencerian social Darwinism in his own annotations to the translation. He understood Spencer's sociology as "not merely analytical and descriptive, but prescriptive as well", and saw Spencer building on Darwin, whom Yan summarized thus: + +Peoples and living things struggle for survival. At first, species struggle with species; as they [people] gradually progress, there is a struggle between one social group and another. The weak invariably become the prey of the strong, the stupid invariably become subservient to the clever. +By the 1920s, social Darwinism found expression in the promotion of eugenics by the Chinese sociologist Pan Guangdan. When Chiang Kai-shek started the New Life Movement in 1934, he "... harked back to theories of Social Darwinism", writing that "only those who readapt themselves to new conditions, day by day, can live properly. When the life of a people is going through this process of readaptation, it has to remedy its own defects, and get rid of those elements which become useless. Then we call it new life." +Zhang Jingsheng was a notable proponent of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism in 20th-century China. His chosen name, Jingsheng, translated to "competition for survival". He advocated a form of eugenics, recommending interracial marriage with Europeans and the Japanese to combat what he perceived as "weaknesses" of the Chinese race. + +=== Germany === +In the 1860s and 1870s, social Darwinism began to take shape in the interaction between Charles Darwin and his German advocates, namely August Schleicher, Max Müller and Ernst Haeckel. Evolutionary linguistics was taken as a platform to construe a Darwinian theory of mankind. Since it was thought at the time that the orangutan and human brain were roughly the same size, Darwin and his colleagues suspected that only the invention of language could account for differentiation between humans and other Great Apes. It was suggested that the evolution of language and the mind must go hand in hand. From this perspective, empirical evidence from languages from around the world was interpreted by Haeckel as supporting the idea that nations, despite having rather similar physiology, represented such distinct lines of 'evolution' that mankind should be divided into nine different species. Haeckel constructed an evolutionary and intellectual hierarchy of such species. In a similar vein, Schleicher regarded languages as different species and sub-species, adopting Darwin's concept of selection through competition to the study of the history and spread of nations. Some of their ideas, including the concept of living space were adopted to the Nazi ideology after their deaths. +Social evolution theories in Germany gained large popularity in the 1860s and had a strong antiestablishment connotation first. Social Darwinism allowed people to counter the connection of Thron und Altar, the intertwined establishment of clergy and nobility, and provided as well the idea of progressive change and evolution of society as a whole. Ernst Haeckel propagated both Darwinism as a part of natural history and as a suitable base for a modern Weltanschauung, a world view based on scientific reasoning in his Monist League. Friedrich von Hellwald had a strong role in popularizing it in Austria. Darwin's work served as a catalyst to popularize evolutionary thinking. +A sort of aristocratic turn, the use of the struggle for life as a base of social Darwinism sensu stricto came up after 1900 with Alexander Tille's 1895 work Entwicklungsethik ('Ethics of Evolution'), which asked to move "from Darwin till Nietzsche". Further interpretations moved to ideologies propagating a racist and hierarchical society and provided ground for the later radical versions of social Darwinism. +Social Darwinism came to play a major role in the ideology of Nazism, which combined it with a similarly pseudo-scientific theory of racial hierarchy to identify the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. Nazi social Darwinist beliefs led them to retain business competition and private property as economic engines. Nazism likewise opposed social welfare based on a social Darwinist belief that the weak and feeble should perish. This association with Nazism, coupled with increasing recognition that it was scientifically unfounded, contributed to the broader rejection of social Darwinism after the end of World War II. + +== Criticism of social Darwinism as a category == +Social Darwinism has many definitions, and some of them are incompatible with each other. As such, the term has been criticized for being inconsistent and not describing a coherent ideology. For example, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics states: + +Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to "survival of the fittest" entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A "social Darwinist" could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist. + +== Criticism of social Darwinism as an ideology == + +=== Nazism, eugenics, fascism, imperialism === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9dc04b804 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 6/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Social Darwinism was predominantly found in laissez-faire societies where the prevailing view was that of an individualist order to society. A different form of social Darwinism was part of the ideological foundations of Nazism and other fascist movements. This form did not envision survival of the fittest within an individualist order of society, but rather advocated a type of racial and national struggle where the state directed human breeding through eugenics. Names such as "Darwinian collectivism" or "Reform Darwinism" have been suggested to describe these views to differentiate them from the individualist type of social Darwinism. +As mentioned above, social Darwinism has often been linked to nationalism and imperialism. During the age of New Imperialism, the concepts of evolution justified the exploitation of "lesser breeds without the law" by "superior races". To elitists, strong nations were composed of white people who were successful at expanding their empires, and as such, these strong nations would survive in the struggle for dominance. With this attitude, Europeans, except for Christian missionaries, seldom adopted the customs and languages of local people under their empires. + +=== Peter Kropotkin and mutual aid === +Peter Kropotkin argued in his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution that Darwin did not define the fittest as the strongest, or most clever, but recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other. In many animal societies, "struggle is replaced by co-operation". + +It may be that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality of the factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of facts relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient species. But he foresaw that the term [evolution] which he was introducing into science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only—that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." [Quoting Origin of Species, chap. iii, p. 62 of first edition.] +While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its narrow meaning. In The Descent of Man he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. "Those communities", he wrote, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd ed., p. 163). The term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature. +Kropotkin, an anarchist, described how co-operation exists in nature, and that it too must serve a purpose in natural selection. This is only social Darwinism in that the case for mutual aid in society is made by appealing to evolutionary biology. To Kropotkin, the state is "unnatural" in the sense that it prevents the realisation of what he deemed to be the next stage of human social evolution: anarcho-communism. Though there are similarities, this position differs from dialectical materialism. + +=== Fabianism === +In contrast, Fabians in the early 1900s sought to use the state as the means through which a collectivist social Darwinism was to be put into effect. The common Fabian views of the time reconciled a specific form of state socialism and the goal of reducing poverty with eugenics policies. +"[These policies] imply a total disregard for any idea of individual self-fulfilment as the aim of a socialist society ...These policies also implied a notion of the person as a set of genetically fixed qualities, where experience and environment came a very poor second by comparison with innate characteristics. In the debate between nature and nurture, the former was seen to have a massive advantage." + +== See also == + +== References == + +=== Primary sources === +Robinson, Daniel N., ed. (1977), Darwinism: Critical Reviews from Dublin Review, Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, University Publications of America, ISBN 9780890931738. (reprints 19th-century reviews and essays) +Darwin, Charles (1859), On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, London: John Murray. +Darwin, Charles (1882), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd ed.), London: John Murray. +Fisher, Joseph (1877), "The History of Landholding in Ireland", Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, V, London: 228–326, doi:10.2307/3677953, JSTOR 3677953, S2CID 145423812. +Fiske, John (1900), Darwinism and Other Essays, Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..133f4fb6e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Social Darwinism" +chunk: 7/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:31.343708+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Secondary sources === +Bannister, Robert C. (1989), Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought, ISBN 9780877225669. +Bannister, Robert C. (1987), Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1940, ISBN 9780807817339. +Bernardini, J.-M. (1997), Le darwinisme social en France (1859–1918). Fascination et rejet d'une idéologie, CNRS Edition, ISBN 9782271054838. +Boller, Paul F., Jr. (1969), American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900, OCLC 12715, archived from the original on 4 June 2011{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link). +Bowler, Peter J. (2003), Evolution: The History of an Idea (3rd ed.), University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520236936. +Crook, Paul (1994), Darwinism, War and History : The Debate over the Biology of War from the 'Origin of Species' to the First World War, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521444651. +Crook, Paul (1997), Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511558481, ISBN 9780511558481, archived from the original on 4 June 2011. +Crook, Paul (2007), Darwin's Coat-Tails: Essays on Social Darwinism, Peter Lang, ISBN 9780820481388. +Degler, Carl N. (1992), In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195063806. +Desmond, Adrian; Moore, James (1991), Darwin, London: Michael Joseph, Penguin Group, ISBN 9780718134303. +Dickens, Peter (2000), Social Darwinism: Linking Evolutionary Thought to Social Theory, Open University Press, ISBN 9780335202195. +Gossett, Thomas F. (1999), Race: The History of an Idea in America, Southern Methodist University Press, ISBN 9780870740657, archived from the original on 4 June 2011. +Hawkins, Mike (1997), Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860–1945: Nature and Model and Nature as Threat, London: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521574341. +Hodge, Jonathan; Radick, Gregory (2003), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ISBN 9780521771979, archived from the original on 20 October 2011. +Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (December 2004), "Social Darwinism in Anglophone Academic Journals: A Contribution to the History of the Term", Journal of Historical Sociology, 17 (4): 428–463, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.524.4248, doi:10.1111/j.1467-6443.2004.00239.x, hdl:2299/406, retrieved 17 February 2010, Social Darwinism, as almost everyone knows, is a Bad Thing. +Hofstadter, Richard (1992) [1944], Social Darwinism in American Thought (new introduction ed.), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 9780807055038. +Jones, Leslie (August 1998), "Social Darwinism Revisited", History Today, 48 (8): 6–8, ISSN 0018-2753, archived from the original on 4 June 2011. +Kaye, Howard L. (1997), The Social Meaning of Modern Biology: From Social Darwinism to Sociobiology, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 9781560009146. +Sammut-Bonnici, T.; Wensley, R. (2002), "Darwinism, Probability and Complexity: Transformation and Change Explained through the Theories of Evolution", International Journal of Management Reviews, 4 (3): 291–315, doi:10.1111/1468-2370.00088. +Smith, George H. (2008), "Social Darwinism", in Hamowy, Ronald (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute, pp. 472–474, doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n289, ISBN 978-1412965804, OCLC 750831024 +Versen, Christopher R. (2009), "What's Wrong with a Little Social Darwinism (In Our Historiography)", The History Teacher, 42 (4): 403–423, JSTOR 40543493. + +== External links == +Social Darwinism on ThinkQuest Archived 24 June 2005 at the Wayback Machine +In the name of Darwin – criticism of social Darwinism \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-0.md index 067bf84ce..2a63733d8 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:07:11.658331+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:01.068321+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-1.md index 41308e9ea..10dbbb7ca 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:07:11.658331+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:01.068321+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-2.md index 21ea0573e..c28094c3f 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_and_the_history_of_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:07:11.658331+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:28:01.068321+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..04dcce932 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Socionics" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:32.583410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In psychology and sociology, socionics is a pseudoscientific theory of information processing and personality types. It incorporates Carl Jung's work on Psychological Types with Antoni Kępiński's theory of information metabolism. +In contrast to the generally accepted views in personality psychology on age-related variability of the human psyche, socionics distinguishes 16 psychophysiological types (sociotypes) which it claims go unchanged throughout a person's life. The existence of personality types is extremely controversial in modern personality psychology. +Socionics was developed in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily by the Lithuanian researcher Aušra Augustinavičiūtė. The name "socionics" is derived from the word "society", because Augustinavičiūtė believed that each sociotype has a distinct purpose in society. +The central idea of socionics is that information is intuitively divisible into eight categories, called information elements, which a person's psyche processes using eight psychological functions. Each sociotype has a different correspondence between functions and information elements, which it posits results in different ways of handling information and distinct thinking patterns. One prevalent idea in socionics is the theory of intertype relations, which is based on the interaction of these functions between types. +Independent authors point to the insufficient empirical validity of socionics both in its basis and in its further development, as well as the practical absence of studies on socionics outside the former USSR. The Commission on Pseudoscience of the Russian Academy of Sciences has placed socionics among such well-known pseudosciences as astrology and homeopathy. + +== Purpose == +Socionics provides a means of predicting the character of relations and degree of business compatibility, information sharing and psychological compatibility of people before their joining in one collective group, i.e. to solve the "inverse task" of sociometry. +According to Aleksandr Bukalov and Betty Lou Leaver, socionics uses Jungian typology, informational model of psyche, and theory of information metabolism for political and sociological analysis. +According to J. Horwood, and A. Maw, socionics is a science developed by Augustinavičiūtė in the 1970s. Augustinavičiūtė and her colleagues worked with Carl Jung's personality typologies to develop personality-based relationship profiles. It was found that the nature and development of interpersonal relationships (both professional and personal) are far from random. Instead, they are based on how well suited each individual's psychological profiles are to one another, allowing Augustinavičiūtė to develop 16 'socionic types' predicting and describing the interpersonal relationships between any combination of Jung's personality types. +According to R. Blutner and E. Hochnadel, "socionics is not so much a theory of personalities per se, but much more a theory of type relations providing an analysis of the relationships that arise as a consequence of the interaction of people with different personalities." +Philosopher L. Monastyrsky treats socionics as pre-science. At the same time, L. Monastyrsky himself proposes to pay attention to "the concept of socionic type". +Philosopher E. Pletuhina defines socionics as the study about the information interaction of the human psyche with the outside world, between people. She also defines it as the doctrine of psychological types of people and the relationships between them, as well as notes that the particular quality of socionics is that it considers the innate qualities of the human psyche, including the personality type, which cannot be arbitrarily changed without prejudice to the mental and physical health. + +== History == +The basic structure of socionics was established in the 1960s and 1970s by Augustinavičiūtė, along with a group of enthusiasts who met in Vilnius, Lithuania. What resulted from their discussions and Augustinavičiūtė's personal investigations was an information model of the psyche and of interpersonal interaction based on Jung's typology but with eight psychic functions rather than four. Augustinavičiūtė's first works on socionics were published between 1978 and 1980. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..86b9707c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Socionics" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:32.583410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Socionics as an academic discipline === +Through the work of the International Institute of Socionics and other schools of socionics, there are four scientific peer-reviewed journals (on the practical application of the methods of socionics in management, consulting, psychology, pedagogy, education, psychotherapy, and humanities) and an annual International conference on socionics. The Institute gives "popularization and proliferation of socionic knowledge" as one of its goals. +Svetlana V. Ivanova claims that socionics is taught in more than 150 universities in Russia, Ukraine and other CIS and European Union countries. +Areas of research include educational socionics, sociological socionics, aviation socionics, library socionics, technical socionics, linguistic socionics, penitentiary socionics, and socionics in other subject areas. +Socionics is used in education, not only as a tool for teachers to manage the learning process, but also as a basis for the development and improvement of education and training. Bogdanova claim that a teacher holding socionic knowledge and technologies can consciously collaborate with others and improve professional efficiency. Targeted use of intertype relations helps intensify the didactic process, increase the motivation of students. Socionics is also used to assess the individual psychological and personal qualities to forecast the success of employee career. +Izmailova and Kiseleva found socionics interesting to be applied in advertising and marketing, because it allows you to explain the reasons for the behavior of consumers. +Socionics is a tool for the study of personality and creativity of the writer, the typology of the characters in his works. The method of linguistic-socionic modeling proposed by L. M. Komissarova, used for analysis of individual lexicon of language personality. A translation of socionic characteristics in verbal ones is called the "method of linguistic-socionic modeling" and widely used. +Socionic methods have been proposed for the modeling of information processes in the "human-machine" systems, and practically used to model systems "aircraft operator" in pilots' training, and other similar areas. +Due to the variety of applications of socionics, its concepts and information models, in the 1990s, Bukalov proposed to distinguish socionics of personality, or differential socionics, and generalized, more abstract integral socionics. Bukalov believes that the concept of information metabolism, cybernetic modeling and general systems theory extends beyond of psychology and sociology, and consider the relationship of technical information devices, and the types of information human interactions as operator with various technical and electronic management systems of major industries, including chemical, nuclear power stations, complex computer complexes with adaptive tunable to a specific operator interfaces. + +=== Pedagogical socionics === +The concepts and methods of socionics are used in pedagogy, this collaboration creates a new scientific branch – pedagogical socionics. +Pletuhina noted that the parent, trainer or teacher, who knows the theory of socionics, who also understands an idea of the "image of a socionics type" and who can determine the child's personality type with a sufficient degree of probability can use those opportunities of the individual approaches that socionics provides to raise and educate a child. +The role that socionics takes in the educational process is not limited to being a teacher's tool for the managing process. It is also a base for development and improving the educational system and for preparing staff. Teachers armed with socionics technology can consciously establish relationships with other people and increase efficiency of their pedagogical skills. Rational implementation of intertype relationships can push educational process to become more intensive and increase students' motivation. +Socionics is also researched practical methods and techniques dedicated to evaluation person's individual psychological values to prognoses professional success. Keneva, Marchenko, and Minaev argue that socionics might become a theoretical base for personal-oriented educational technologies. + +== Information metabolism elements == + +In socionics, Jung's cognitive functions are always either introverted (focused on refining quality) or extroverted (focused on increasing quantity), and are referred to as information metabolism elements (IM Elements). These are said to process information aspects. To understand what an information aspect is, it is necessary to understand information metabolism as Augustinavičiūtė understood it. +Augustinavičiūtė states that the human mind uses eight elements of information metabolism (mental functions) to perceive the world, and each of these eight elements reflect one particular aspect of objective reality. In her works she describes aspects of the world based on physical quantities such as potential and kinetic energy, space, time, and their properties. +Often, other socionists have equated these information elements with their definition and according to fundamental physical concepts as well (Matter-Time-Energy-Space).). Matter is compared to Thinking, Energy to Feeling, Space to Sensing, and Time to Intuition. Given the division of aspects of the absolute between Extroverted ("black") and Introverted ("white"), being four times two, their number is eight. +The 8 socionics symbols ( ) were introduced by Augustinavičiūtė while working with Jung's typology and remain the dominant method of denoting the functions and the corresponding information aspects that they process. Text-based notation systems are also used, such as Victor Gulenko's 8 Latin letters ('P' for Pragmatism, 'E' for Emotions, 'F' for Force, 'I' for Ideas, 'L' for Laws, 'R' for Relation, 'S' for Senses, and 'T' for Time, respectively), or Myers-Briggs notation (Te, Fe, Se, Ne, Ti, Fi, Si, and Ni, respectively). \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bbe45c5aa --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Socionics" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socionics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:32.583410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== The 16 types == +Augustinavičiūtė usually used names like sensory-logical introvert (SLI) to refer to the types. In SLI the leading function is introverted sensation and the creative function is extraverted logic. She also introduced the practice of referring to types by the name of a famous person of the type (although types of these persons are not universally agreed upon, with the old name Napoleon for the SEE being replaced by Caesar after being deemed an inaccurate type assignment). For example, she called the SLI Gabin and the SEI Dumas. Also sometimes names such as Craftsman or Mediator are used to express the social role of the type—a convention introduced by socionist Viktor Gulenko in 1995. Given the formal similarities present between Socionics and the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) abbreviations frequently used in English, some prefer to distinguish socionic type names from Myers–Briggs' names by writing the last letter (J or P) in lower case (for example, ENTp, ESFj)—a practice introduced by Sergei Ganin. This is because the relationship between socionics and Myers–Briggs and Keirseyan types is controversial. +Dmitri Lytov and Marianna Lytova state that "main spheres of application of socionics are almost the same as for the Myers–Briggs Type Theory", and that observed differences in correlation "represent characteristic stereotypes of the socionics and the Keirsey typology. Others state that MBTI and socionics "correlate in roughly 30% of cases," and that "there are many subtle differences". J and P in Socionics and Myers–Briggs are completely different: in Myers–Briggs, J and P stands for the first extraverted function (J—extraverted thinking or feeling, P—extraverted sensing or intuition); in Socionics, J and P stands for the first function (J—rational (thinking and feeling), P—irrational (sensing and intuition)). This formal conversion is carried out in accordance with the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. +In dividing the socion according to the four Jungian dichotomies, from this is formed 16 socionic types. The following tables provide a list of types with the names most commonly used in socionics: + +The second concept is the functional dimensions. It was introduced by Aleksandr Bukalov. He defined the first dimension as the personal experience (Ex), the second dimension as social norms (Nr), the third dimension as the current situation (St), and the fourth dimension as the globality, or time perspective (Tm). This concept is useful because it best illustrates the difference in cognitive power (imagine measuring capability of 2D v. 3D measuring tool) and roughly describes abilities of each function to process and generate information. Still, definitions of dimensions require further research and clarification. For example, the vulnerable function tends to lose knowledge which have not been used. + +== Criticism == +Psychophysiologist Sergey Bogomaz says there is no reason for considering socionics as a separate science. He considers socionic typology to be a Russian version of post-Jung typology, similar to the Myers-Briggs typology, but distinguished by a greater number of typological features and the formulation of prerequisites for the study of intertype relationships. Bogomaz considers the construction of the theory of intertype relationships to be an undoubted contribution of Augustinavičiūtė to the development of Jung typology, but criticized it by stating that there is little experimental data in socionics, there is no empirical verification of many claims, and by having many unsystematic pseudoscientific publications. +Philosopher L. M. Monastirsky identified the use of speculative categories as the first shortcoming of socionics. Secondly, he stated that it lacks clearly defined typing method and each socionics school defines methods of their own. At the same time Monastirsky, recognizing the potential of socionics, proposed to turn to the concept of a socionic type for carrying out some research in the field of the methodology of science. +An important issue in the field of socionics is the problem of convergence between type diagnoses of different analysts. Vladimir Ermak showed that ignorance of model A of the type of information metabolism leads to numerous mistakes in the definition of a socionic type. In the early 2000s, socionic analysts tried to develop more rigorous approaches to type diagnosis. + +== See also == +Analytical psychology +Jungian Type Index +Myers–Briggs Type Indicator +Information metabolism of Antoni Kępiński + +== References == + +== External links == +Media + +Martianova Maria (2016-03-15). "Лженаука про Гамлетов и Дон-Кихотов. Почему соционика не является наукой" [Pseudoscience About Hamlets and Don Quixotes. Why Socionics is Not a Science] (in Russian). Gazeta.Ru. Retrieved 2020-08-04. +Videos + +Александр Панчин и Никита Ванчагов. Астрология, соционика и родственные заблуждения. [Aleksandr Panchin and Nikita Vanchagov. Astrology, Socionics and Related Misconceptions] on YouTube — biologist Alexander Panchin is member of special Commission of Russian Academy of Sciences to Combat Pseudoscience. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a7bbd57d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Somatic psychology" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:33.819990+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Somatic psychology or, more precisely, somatic clinical psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on somatic experience, including therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body. It seeks to explore and heal mental and physical injury and trauma through body awareness and movement. Wilhelm Reich was first to try to develop a clear psychodynamic approach that included the body. +Several types of body-oriented psychotherapies trace their origins back to Reich, though there have been many subsequent developments and other influences on body psychotherapy, and somatic psychology is of particular interest in trauma work. Trauma describes a long-lasting distressing experience that can be subconsciously stored and bear upon bodily health. Somatic psychology seeks to describe, explain and understand the nature of embodied consciousness and bridge the philosophical mind-body problem. + +== Origins == +The word soma comes from σῶμα, the Ancient Greek word for body; psyche (ψυχή) evolved from a word for breath to mean life or spirit; and -logy (-λογία) means “study of”. Studying the relationship between the body and the psyche, meaning mind, soul or spirit, is an ancient practice. +In the West, systematic study and debate about the body-mind relationship intensified with the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution within the field of philosophy. These debates have been continuously reframed by philosophers throughout modern times, from René Descartes with his mind–body dualism to Patricia Churchland who applies neuroscientific insights to philosophy. +Psychology as a scientific discipline emerged gradually from the field of philosophy during the European Enlightenment. The term somatopsychic was introduced by the German psychiatrist Maximilian Jacobi (1775–1858). Sigmund Freud, a highly influential figure in the evolution of psychology, saw the body as central in his theories and techniques. In 1923 he wrote that "the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body." +Somatic psychology was first studied by Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian physician who initially was Freud’s student. His approach was influenced by Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian neurologist who also studied with Freud and gave insight to Reich to write his book Character Analysis. Reich was also interested in the origin of psychosomatic illness where George Groddeck, a friend of Ferenczi, influenced him a lot. He was the pioneer of somatic psychology from a medical point of view. Reich used vegetotherapy to name somatic psychology as it was touching upon the nervous system. Reich's approach goes beyond traditional therapies, it emphasizes the significance of the body on therapeutic processes, by exploring the connections between the body, brain and mind to avoid certain tensions. His discovery continues to influence contemporary therapy processes and is still relevant in today’s practice. + +== Trauma storing in the body == +Since somatic clinical psychotherapy tries to heal mental and physical injury and trauma through body awareness, it is important to know what happens in the body when trauma is experienced to be able to help the patients. Whenever someone experiences trauma, it can manifest in the body and lead to mental and physical health issues. The way trauma can lead to those health issues is closely connected to the effect it has on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, since experiencing trauma leads to the HPA getting sensitized. The HPA describes the interaction between the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands and is responsible for controlling body functions such as breathing, heartbeat and blood pressure as well as the endocrine stress response. +In every person that feels distressed, the amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus which activates the sympathetic nervous system and the hormone epinephrine gets released which triggers the fight-or-flight response. As long as the brain perceives the situation as dangerous, the hypothalamus releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) which leads to the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) which then leads to the release of cortisol. In a healthy person the HPA axis ensures that if the threat passes, the cortisol release is stopped which dilutes the stress response. If a person experienced trauma, due to the HPA axis being sensitized the HPA axis stays activated and the stress response can become chronic. +The constant release of the stress hormones can lead to physiological problems, like heart damage, diabetes and digestive issues through the excessive release of epinephrine and cortisol. Psychological effects such as anxiety, depression and disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be triggered as well by the constant stress response of the body. To help patients with those mental and physical health issues there are different somatic therapy techniques. + +== Techniques == +Somatic therapy techniques are commonly used to treat cases like Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Failed prior therapy techniques enforced the need for more sophisticated ways of caring for the condition, through which Cognitive Behavioural Somatic Therapy was introduced. +Somatic Experiencing (SE) is used as such a treatment for PTSD. It focuses on interoceptive, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive experiences, which can resolve symptoms of chronic and traumatic stress. This bottom-up process focuses on the psycho-physiological consequences of the traumatic event and aims to recalibrate the dysregulation of the bodily responses in an indirect way. +This technique aims to help regulate cognition and body, and is therefore powerful in addressing clinical dissociative disorders. Such sensorimotor techniques are often versatile and highly individual, created and adjusted for the patient, ranging in differing physical movements targeting the patient's weak point in an effort to build self-awareness and self-regulation. Such bottom-up movements stimulate self-awareness and self-regulation, like dance, breathing, and even a full-body workout depending on the individual's condition and need. +Combining somatic psychology with group therapy can be effective for attachment disorders, transference impasse, and trauma. Incorporating somatic components through sensory awareness and movement of the body, is most effective for patients who experienced physiological trauma. Teaching body awareness through monitoring physiological responses or behaviors, achieves or improves self-regulation, stabilization and a close connection to themselves or others. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..96c527215 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Somatic psychology" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_psychology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:33.819990+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Efficiency/positivism == +The effectiveness of somatic psychology and experiencing is still unclear. There are studies that show beneficial data points of somatic experiencing on PTSD-associated symptoms and depression. Somatic experiencing also showed positive impacts on affective and somatic symptoms, and general well-being outside of PTSD-treatment. Different limitations are encountered within studies that show positive results, such as small samples and not following rigorous methodological criteria. Insufficient research has been done to evaluate and compare the differential impacts of various modalities, despite the results of those modalities being relatively similar. The data is encouraging, but more objective studies are required to completely comprehend the efficacy of somatic psychology and experiencing, and improving the method-specific factors. + +== East Asian examples of somatic psychology == + +== Criticism == +Few studies have shown the beneficial effects of implementing somatic psychology into PTSD treatment, but the conclusion on the effectiveness of somatic therapy has yet to be established. Assessing the efficacy of that method, requires a broader examination of scientific research on body-oriented psychotherapy. Another problem regarding the subject is an increased potential for re-traumatization of a patient. While somatic experiencing can be healing, it is also accessing trauma stored deeply in the body. Being such a fickle matter, if treated by an inefficiently trained practitioner, may lead to resurgence of traumatic symptoms. + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Marlock, G.; Weiss, H. (2015). The Handbook of Body Psychotherapy & Somatic Psychology. North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-158394841-5. +Shane, P. (2023). Principles of Somatic Psychology: An Evidence-Based, Transdisciplinary Approach for the Holistic Healthcare Professions. Center for Bodymind Education. ISBN 978-166788-590-2. + +== External links == + Media related to Somatic psychology at Wikimedia Commons \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatotype_and_constitutional_psychology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatotype_and_constitutional_psychology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6d0cb3522 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatotype_and_constitutional_psychology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,356 @@ +--- +title: "Somatotype and constitutional psychology" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatotype_and_constitutional_psychology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T09:25:34.991640+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Somatotype is a theory proposed in the 1940s by the American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon to categorize the human physique according to the relative contribution of three fundamental elements which he termed somatotypes, classified by him as ectomorphic, mesomorphic, and endomorphic. He created these terms borrowing from the three germ layers of embryonic development: The endoderm (which develops into the digestive tract), the mesoderm (which becomes muscle, heart, and blood vessels) and the ectoderm (which forms the skin and nervous system). Later variations of these categories, developed by his original research assistant Barbara Heath, and later by Lindsay Carter and Rob Rempel, are used by academics today. +Constitutional psychology is a theory developed by Sheldon in the 1940s, which attempted to associate his somatotype classifications with human temperament types. The foundation of these ideas originated with Francis Galton and eugenics. Sheldon and Earnest Hooton were seen as leaders of a school of thought, popular in anthropology at the time, which held that the size and shape of a person's body indicated intelligence, moral worth and future achievement. +In his 1954 book, Atlas of Men, Sheldon categorized all possible body types according to a scale ranging from 1 to 7 for each of the three somatotypes, where the pure endomorph is 7–1–1, the pure mesomorph 1–7–1 and the pure ectomorph scores 1–1–7. From type number, an individual's mental characteristics could supposedly be predicted. In a late version of a pseudoscientific thread within criminology in which criminality is claimed to be an innate characteristic that can be recognized through particular physiognomic markers (as in Cesare Lombroso's theory of phrenology), Sheldon contended that criminals tended to be 'mesomorphic'. The system of somatotyping is still in use in the field of physical education. + + +== The three types == + +Sheldon's "somatotypes" and their associated physical and psychological traits were characterized as follows: + + +=== Stereotyping === +There may be some evidence that different physiques carry cultural stereotypes, as some cultures are more prone to certain physiques. According to one study endomorphs are likely to be perceived as slow, sloppy, and lazy. Mesomorphs, in contrast, are typically stereotyped as popular and hardworking, whereas ectomorphs are often viewed as intelligent yet fearful. + + +== Heath–Carter formula == +Sheldon's physical taxonomy is still in use, particularly the Heath–Carter variant of the methodology. This formulaic approach utilises an individual's body mass (kg), height (cm), upper arm circumference (cm), maximal calf circumference (cm), femur breadth (cm), humerus breadth (cm), triceps skinfold (mm), subscapular skinfold (mm), supraspinal skinfold (mm), and medial calf skinfold (mm), and remains popular in anthropometric research, according to Rempel: "with modifications by Parnell in the late 1950s, and by Heath and Carter in the mid 1960s somatotype has continued to be the best single qualifier of total body shape". +This variant utilizes the following series of equations to assess a subject's traits against each of the three somatotypes, each assessed on a seven-point scale, with 0 indicating no correlation and 7 indicating a very strong correlation: + + + + + + Endomorphy + + = + − + 0.7182 + + + 0.145 + x + − + 0.00068 + + x + + 2 + + + + + 0.0000014 + + x + + 3 + + + , + + + {\displaystyle {\text{Endomorphy}}=-0.7182+0.145x-0.00068x^{2}+0.0000014x^{3},} + + +where + + + + x + = + ( + + tricep skinfold [mm] + + + + + subscapular skinfold [mm] + + + + + supraspinal skinfold [mm] + + ) + × + + + 170.18 + height [cm] + + + . + + + {\displaystyle x=({\text{tricep skinfold [mm]}}+{\text{subscapular skinfold [mm]}}+{\text{supraspinal skinfold [mm]}})\times {\frac {170.18}{\text{height [cm]}}}.} + + + + + + + + + + + Mesomorphy + + + + + = + 0.858 + × + + humerus breadth [cm] + + + + + + + + + + 0.601 + × + + femur breadth [cm] + + + + + + + + + + 0.188 + × + + upper arm girth [cm] + + + + + + + + + + 0.161 + × + + max calf girth [cm] + + + + + + + + − + 0.131 + × + + height [cm] + + + + + + + + + + 4.5 + + + + + + + {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}{\text{Mesomorphy}}&=0.858\times {\text{humerus breadth [cm]}}\\&+0.601\times {\text{femur breadth [cm]}}\\&+0.188\times {\text{upper arm girth [cm]}}\\&+0.161\times {\text{max calf girth [cm]}}\\&-0.131\times {\text{height [cm]}}\\&+4.5\end{aligned}}} + + +Ectomorphy: calculate the subject's ponderal index + + + + + PI + + = + + + height [cm] + + ( + + mass [kg] + + + ) + + 1 + + / + + 3 + + + + + + . + + + {\displaystyle {\text{PI}}={\frac {\text{height [cm]}}{({\text{mass [kg]}})^{1/3}}}.} + + +If + + + + P + I + > + 40.74 + + + {\displaystyle PI>40.74} + +, + + + + + Ectomorphy + + = + 0.732 + P + I + − + 28.58. + + + {\displaystyle {\text{Ectomorphy}}=0.732PI-28.58.} + + +If + + + + 39.65 + < + P + I + < + 40.74 + + + {\displaystyle 39.65