There But For Science: Blood Navigation

Imagine a world in which sailing ships navigate by the yelps of tormented dogs and nuclear submarines whisper to each other via the screams of rabbits and their murdered young? In both of these cases, science won out over magical thinking -- and actual scientific advances stepped in to solve the problems. Join Robert and Joe as the discuss the powder of sympathy and 20th century state-sponsored paranormal research.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
You know we've just on the podcast here. We've discussed
before how science is sort of this gigantic slime mold

(00:23):
feeling its way through a maze. You've got tapers of
its substance seeking down long, twisting corridors in search of
that that food prize. I guess the food prize of
knowledge in this case, and when they find it, uh,
when we find it, it's on the Greater Meals and uh.
And when this science slime doesn't find it, well, the
tintrals of inquiry tend to dive back, and the system

(00:44):
knows which tunnels are fruitless. So this scenario is somewhat
true even in times before science, or times during which
scientific inquiry was still held back by various shortcomings, because
humans still proceeded on a basically by a trial in
her basis. And there's no surer way to air than
to base a hypothesis on purely magical thinking, right, because

(01:06):
today we're going to be talking about some sympathetic blood magic,
some magical thinking that has supposedly been at least proposed,
if not actually used, in the history of what would
you call it seafaring navigation, uh, finding one's one's allies
under cover of deep ocean and determining one's place on

(01:28):
the globe. Now, I like this metaphor Robert of the
slime mold as as as the model of scientific progress,
because one of the interesting things about scientific progress is
we can almost definitely say that progress is actually made
in science. In other realms, it's debatable whether progress is made.
People argue about whether there's actual progress in philosophy. We

(01:52):
just had our interview with our Scott Baker, and Scott
did not seem to think that philosophy actually made much progress.
He said, you know, we're still asking the same questions
that we were asking thousands of years ago, and we
don't really have new answers to them. Science isn't like that.
Now we definitely know things that we used to not know,

(02:12):
and we can use that knowledge, and yet there's nobody
at the top of the scientific process. There's no brain
of science making decisions about what's knowledge, what's not knowledge,
what's true, what's not true, what areas are the best
to explore. So in the way you use this analogy
of the slime mold, it's almost like a a It's
a process that's blind from the top down and yet

(02:35):
really does make true progress from the bottom up. Yeah,
there's no there's no brain here in the slime mold.
There's no king of science, no secret caball running the
whole scientific operation. And I think the fact that science
is like that, that it doesn't have a top down
control process, that it's just this emergent phenomenon that nevertheless

(02:55):
produces real results and actual progress in the world that
you can be quite sure are real progress. It it's
one of those things that makes it hard to define.
And we've talked about the difficulty before in defining science
and producing a definition of science that is quote necessary
and jointly sufficient. We talked about that back in our

(03:16):
episode about you know, beyond this veil of testing, like
whether things that were maybe post empirical could still be
considered science. And so a necessary and jointly sufficient list
of properties to describe science would be something that describes
everything within the category of science and nothing outside of it.

(03:37):
A good example would be a list of properties that
are necessary and jointly sufficient to describe a triangle. Right.
A triangle is a closed two dimensional figure with three
straight sides and three angle three angles. This rules in
everything that is a triangle, and it rules out everything
that is not a triangle. Sometimes it's really difficult to

(04:00):
do something like that with science. How can you come
up with a list of properties that describes everything that
generates true scientific knowledge and rules out everything that doesn't.
So it seems to me sometimes science might be more
like the concept of a game, things that fall into
a category that Wittgenstein would have called family resemblances. There's

(04:23):
sort of like overlapping similarities between the things we call science,
But there's no list of properties that everything has an
equal measure and that nothing that is not science can claim.
But nevertheless, we do know some really basic categories that
we can say pretty much seem like they pretty much
always appear in science. Right. One of them is going

(04:45):
to be subjecting ideas to empirical testing. That means you
can't just do science in the hypothetical at some point
it needs to encounter a test in real world conditions, right.
And then the other thing is the um when successful
science produces ideas that generate accurate predictions about reality. So

(05:06):
if you're doing science right, you should be able to
predict the future with the ideas you create from it.
That's right now. There are plenty of inherently supernatural notions,
of course that that cannot be proven one way or another.
But when you engage in this process to produce a definite,
measurable result, then you have something. If you're if you're

(05:28):
gonna work some sort of magic and and there's a
definite result, something measurable, something observable. If you set out
down this path, you're gonna get an answer, and uh,
you can probably know what that answer is going to be.
If if you you, if you have you know a
fair amount of scientific reasoning about you. Yeah. I think
one way of putting what you're getting at here and

(05:48):
and correct me if I'm wrong, is that if there
is genuine magic power in the world, you actually should
be able to do science to detect it, Like even
if the causes of it are not necessary early physical
as we would understand the classical concept of physicality, if
there's some other kind of property in the universe guiding it,
we should still be able to do science to detect

(06:11):
magical phenomena as long as the magic behaves in a
consistent way. I think this is the thing that's crucial
to me. And maybe from here I would split proposed
magic into two categories. There are two camps of it.
One is what you might call magical law. In this sense,
it's something that happens in the universe, and it happens

(06:32):
outside the laws of physics, and yet it's still behaves consistently.
You do the same stimulus, you get the same results.
So every time I cast a spell of the same type,
I get the same actual outcome. The other one I
would call capricious magic, and this is magic where it's
not really clear what the consistency of cause and effects

(06:55):
should be. Maybe it works, sometimes it doesn't work other times.
If you have a magical system like this, you really
can't do science on it, because the idea of science
is that you can reproduce your results, right. Yeah, Well,
this makes me think of a few different examples here.
So obviously the existence of God, like a big g God,

(07:16):
a divine being that created the universe, that is most
degree that that's not the kind of thing you can
really scientifically prove one way or the other. Right, there
could be, there couldn't be. In science doesn't really give
you much help knowing the answer, right, and you can
always sort of adjust your parameters for that question to
lean one way then or the other. But what an
area where it becomes a little more interesting is when

(07:38):
you look at let's say, the healing powers of prayer.
And there have been a number of studies that have
looked into this. This is an area where, on one hand,
it seems rather straightforward. You know, okay, this person praise
and then we can see if if health changes, But
of course you're you're engaging not only like magical thinking,
but also varying levels of psychological responses. Right, you could

(07:59):
have a placed effect and stuff like that. And that's
why if you wanted to do a genuine good prayer study,
it would need to be blinded with proper scientific procedures,
so the people and administering the study and the test
subjects and all that don't in fact know whether they're
the ones being prayed for or not. But then on
the other hand, something like turning um staffs into serpents

(08:20):
or water to wine stuff is like a genuine miracle, uh,
that's where it's very clear. Yeah, where there's no like
mediating chance effects, right, unless you ended up explaining in
a way by sort of the you know, thou shalt
not put the Lord thy God to the test kind
of a scenario, and then you're opening it up to
you know, you don't know what's going to happen, right,
you put it back in the capricious magic category. Not

(08:43):
to say that if you believe God behaves that way
that you necessarily believe your your deity to be capricious.
But at least the outcomes seem capricious, there's no way
to predict them, and if there's no way to predict them,
then there's really no way to test it to see
if it's true. So we're gonna continue talking about this topic.

(09:03):
But essentially, as the title of the episode suggests, we're
we're kind of playing a what if game to some
degree as well as we discuss UH as we dive
into some history and some science here, because it's always
it's endlessly fascinating to to play what if games with history. So,
what if European imperialists had suffered more from the New
World illnesses the native people suffered the old world pathogens?

(09:27):
What if the wrong herald had won at the one
the Battle of Stanford Bridge in ten sixty six? Uh?
And and what if the divine win did not save
Japan from Mongol invasion? Okay, but these are all fairly
standard historical outcomes. I mean, we like to play the
game of alternate history. You know, everybody plays it, with
the Man in the High Castle as one example of
how many people have played this. What if the access

(09:49):
powers of one World War two? What would the world
look like? But that's all that's all non magical? Are you?
Are you planning to explore with me, how would history
look different if magic had been real to a certain extent? Because, yeah,
any of these events, if they had occurred, they would
not have changed our understanding of physical reality. But we're

(10:09):
gonna look at a couple of cases where some degree
of if not scientific investigation, then then then at least
semi scientific and inquiry went into a scenario and attempted
to solve a real world problem with essentially magic. Either
if any of these cases had gone differently than yes,

(10:29):
we would have we would have an age of magic,
because it would have changed everything. We would live in
a drastically different world. Okay, well, I have faith in you, Robert.
I want to follow you down this rabbit trail, so
so take me wherever you're thinking we need to go.
All right, we're gonna do a quick break and when
we come back, we will consider a world, a magical
world where navigation of the high seas depends on the

(10:53):
magical torment of dogs. All right, we're back. So we're
gonna be talking now about longitude and the then the
the actual problem of longitude is it related to too
high season navigation? Okay, Now, which one is longitude? That's

(11:13):
east west direction, right, Yeah, that's right. Longitude is east
west positioning. Uh. Latitude is north south positioning and uh
and and we'll get into too why this is a
problem in a bet. But first of all, let's let's
let's break down, um, the potential solution that was that
was that was instrumented, and that entails the use of

(11:34):
sympathetic magic. Okay, Now, sympathetic magic dates back to humanity's
distant prehistoric past. This is the idea that you can
heal a wound by treating the weapon that caused it,
or that possession of an individual's toneo clippings gives you
power over the former owner that you have to hide
your hair after you cut your hair, so which doesn't
get it to use it against you. Really, I mean,

(11:57):
there's a there's a rich variety of sympathetic magical uses
throughout history. Yeah, sympathetic magic, I think is considered a
major class of of magical behavior. And this is the
Scottish anthropologist James Frasier actually wrote plenty about sympathetic magic.
We've talked about Fraser on the show before. I always

(12:18):
want to call him Frasier, but there's not that extra
I in his name. So James Fraser wrote The Golden Bow,
you know, one of the big influences on T. S. Eliott,
one of the big influences on modernism generally. It was
this anthropological work that was attempting to explain the origins
and of religious customs around the world. And it is

(12:40):
a fascinating book to jump into. It's one of those
that I've never read cover to cover, but I jump
into different chapters and read them. And Fraser, I think
would not hold up to modern scrutiny in terms of
anthropological methods. So I'm sure a lot of what he
reports is not necessarily corre act to data about you know,

(13:01):
different people's all over the world. It's based on a
outmoded anthropological data gathering method. You know, he's relying on
all these weird anecdotes and stuff. But he also just
has a lot of really interesting analytical things to say
about the way people think about magic and the way
people think about religion, and the relationship between different magical

(13:23):
and religious ideas. So he breaks down sympathetic magic into
two different categories. One is homeopathic magic, which is the
law of similarity, and the other is contagious magic, which
operates on the law of contact. So I'm going to
read a quote where he talks about the difference of
the ideas here quote. Homeopathic magic is founded on the

(13:47):
association of ideas by similarity. Contagious magic is founded on
the association of ideas by contiguity. Homeopathic magic commits the
mistake of assuming that things which read symbol each other
are the same. Contagious magic commits the mistake of assuming
that things which have once been in contact with each

(14:08):
other are always in contact. But in practice, the two
branches are often combined, or, to be more exact, While
homeopathic or imitative magic may be practiced by itself. Contagious
magic will generally be found to involve an application of
the homeopathic or imitative principle. And I think there's a

(14:30):
lot to what he's saying there. We've got this general
idea that you can use one thing that's like another
thing in order to have some kind of magical influence.
I think of a you know, a doll that represents
a person, looks like them, and you can use that
to manipulate the person. But almost any time you have
the idea of contact, you can't just touch a random

(14:53):
thing to a person. Usually, maybe in some cases you
can touch a random thing to somebody's arm and then
now you've got power over them. Usually it seems like
it needs to be a thing that has some kind
of sympathetic route with the person, like it's it's it
was formerly a part of their body, or it's something
that belonged to I don't know, a member of their

(15:14):
family or something like that. Now, another one of the
key observations I think Fraser makes is that in the
mind of the magic believer, quote logic is implicit not explicit,
And I think this is one of the things that's
key to understanding what magic is when when we try
to reckon the idea of magical thinking versus scientific thinking.

(15:37):
And I would put it like this, with scientific explanations,
a lot of times when you when you see a
phenomenon in the world, it doesn't seem to make much sense.
You don't understand why it happened. But when you get
a scientific explanation, it starts to make more sense. Right,
And the deeper you go, the more everything fits together

(15:59):
and the call usal relationships become clear. Magical thinking, on
the other hand, means that the more you try to
explain exactly how magic works, the less sense it makes. Yeah,
just think about watching fantasy movies or reading fantasy books.
I would say in my experience, I don't know if
maybe you'll disagree, but in my experience, the more general

(16:22):
and vague the magic, the easier you accept it, and
the more explicit it gets about magic powers, how they work,
where they come from, the function of magic objects all that.
If it gets really deep into the weeds, almost like
trying to explore the scientific causation underlying magical influence, it

(16:43):
becomes more and more ridiculous and makes less and less sense.
At least in my experience, I would agree with without
in most cases, I think that they're the rare exception.
And one of the reasons, one of them the many
reasons I love this series so much is that our
Scott Baker's dark fantasy series, though the Second Apocalypse, like,
he has a really thought out magical system that's ultimately
based in philosophical models, So that one works for me.

(17:06):
But I think for the most part, you're You're correct.
There's a certain I think part part of the thing
is here is so you have a wizard on the
screen and casting a spell using you know, homeopathic magic
or contagious magic perhaps, like both of these are forms
of magic. It kind of made to make a subconscious
sense to us in just in our daily lives. But

(17:27):
for instance, with with contagious magic, I instantly think of
examples of someone's someone's like, oh, you know, I shook
hands with a famous person. I'll never wash this hand again.
Four sentiments of like, oh, this this shirt was touched
by by, uh, you know, Paul McCarthy. I can never
wash this as Paul McCarthy. Yeah, Paul McCarthy the Beatle, Right,
Paul McCartney McCartney. McCarthy, sorry, I've got a lot of

(17:51):
man you got ripped off on eBay, Robert Darnet Paul McCarthy, Um, yeah,
I thought he was really down on communism for an
old school rocker. But anyway, uh my My point being
that both of these types of magic kind of play
into the ways we we think about objects and we
think about contact. Oh totally. Yeah. I think it's interesting

(18:14):
that that you see homeopathic alternative medicine still being practiced today.
The idea, you know, and and it really does have
a root in this idea of homeopathic magic because here
it's the idea of similarity gives things magical influence over
one another. In homeopathic medicine, so called medicine. The it's

(18:36):
the idea is basically that like cures like one the
thing that produces one effect will also cure that effect. Yeah, yeah,
this is a good point. Now, I mentioned this weapon
example earlier, and that's going to be a key to
what we're discussing about the idea that you could heal
the wound by treating the weapon that caused it. Okay,
so if I walk up to you and stab you

(18:56):
with a bowie knife and then later I feel bad
about and I want to heal you, but I can't
find you. I could just what rap bandages around the knife. Yeah,
it's kind of like like he's been stabbed. Get this
knife to a hospital. A certain extent um, This was
a real idea that was that was that was rather
popular in the seventeenth century because it all entails this

(19:19):
thing that was called the powder of sympathy. Oh boy,
that sounds great already. Yeah, this was the idea. Here
was simply dust the weapon and the special powder, and
you in turn treat the wound it created. It's a
it's you know, it's kind of a spooky action at
a distance kind of scenario. This particular notion was concocted
by natural philosopher uh Sir Kenelman Digby, who through sixteen

(19:43):
sixty five distant relative of Arthur Digby Sellers. He wrote
a book on this subject, Discourse on the Powder of Sympathy,
and it went through like twenty nine different editions and
so popular stuff. I guess, yeah, it it made the
rounds uh. And he would in this book he would
describe how he could he could make a patient jump
by putting addressing from the patient's wounds into a basin

(20:08):
full of this special powder. So it is sort of like,
h It's like a remote acting sympathetic magic catalyst essentially. Yeah,
and I actually have have some instructions on how to
make it, uh that I'm gonna read. You're gonna jump
in with some some explanations here as needed, But this

(20:29):
is Digby's own words. Okay, take good English vitriol, which
you may buy for twopence a pound, And of course
vitriol means sulfate, usually sulfuric acid. Dissolve it in warm
water using no more water than we'll dissolve it, leaving
some of the impurest part at the bottom undissolved. Then

(20:50):
pour it off and filter it, which you may do
by a coffin of fine gray paper. The coffin that's
what I have here, Uh, put put into a funnel,
or by laying a sheet of gray paper and a
sieve and pouring or water or dissolution of vitriol into
it by degrees, setting the sieve upon a large pan

(21:13):
to receive the filtered liquor. When all your liquor is filtered,
boil it in an earthen vessel glazed till you see
a thin scum upon it. Then set it in a
cellar to cool, covering it loosely so that nothing may
fall in. After two or three days standing, pour off
the liquor and you will find at the bottom and

(21:34):
on the sides large and fair green crystals like emeralds.
Drain off all the water clean from them and dry them.
Then spread them abroad and a large flat earthen dish
and expose them to the hot sun in the dog days,
taking them in at night and setting them out in
the morning, securing them from the rain. And when the

(21:56):
sun hath calcimed them to whiteness, beat them to powder.
And set this powder again in the sun, stirring it sometimes,
and when you see it perfectly white, powder it and
sift it finally, and set it again in the sun
for a day, and you will have a pure white powder,
which is the powder of sympathy. I like how there

(22:17):
is almost the You get the feeling that he's inserting
unnecessary steps to make it more work, to make it
seem more likely to have a real efficacy. Yeah, and
this this reminds me of other recipes that I've read
from particularly books on alchemy, whether it'll be this kind
of convoluted recipe, instructions that entail moving it in and

(22:40):
out of the sun, hiding it in a basement, and
in the more magical examples like making sure that it's
exposed uh to sunlight at the right degrees and through
the you know, like a westward facing window, etcetera. I've
got a theory about this, let me know what you think.
Probably not a very well developed theory, more of a hypothesis.
My idea is that spells and instructions like this, for

(23:04):
for all these potions and things have all of these
complicated steps, maybe not consciously, but they often do because
they're exploiting the sunk costs fallacy. I think about the
sunk costs fallacy a lot. I think it determines a
lot of our decisions. The sunk costs fallacy is that
you are more likely to continue investing in something, or

(23:26):
more likely to continue believing it or to think it
was a good idea. If you've already expended a lot
of personal time, money, or energy on it, You're you're
trying to convince yourself that you have not wasted your resources.
And thus, if you tell somebody well, uh, you know,
just get this one thing from the store and grind

(23:46):
it up into a powder and it has magical powers.
You've not made them go all in with it, right,
and so if it doesn't work, they're just like, well
I got ripped off. But if you make them spend
days and days and doing all these complicated, laborious steps,
you might be able to exploit their desire not to
have feel that they have wasted their time. Un Thus,

(24:08):
they're more likely to be like, wow, yeah, I think
it works. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's kind
of like if you if you have poor in assembly
instructions for a piece of furniture and you have to
backtrack and reassemble and switch things around at the end
of it. I mean, I'm not going to add I'm
not going to add on the additional feeling of defeat
by thinking it looks bad. I'm gonna tell myself, no,

(24:30):
this thing looks this looks good. It's worth the money,
it's worth the time I spent assembling it and partially
disassembling it. It was it was worth the effort. Or
I think some people may encounter this with a recipe.
You know, you spend half a day making a cake,
Um my mind will not be able to just survive
the reality of that cake not tasting absolutely delicious. And

(24:52):
I think it has Uh, it has a similar effect
even if you're not actually trying to convince yourself it's
not bad. So I think about if I spend a
lot of time working on a dinner, if I put
a lot of work into it, I enjoy it more
in the end, even if it's not like it turns
out bad and I'm trying to convince myself it's actually good.
Even if I think it's actually pretty good, I just

(25:13):
like it more if I worked on it a lot. Now,
in the case of the powder sympathy, obviously we're we're
going with working assumption that this does not work. This
is purely magical thinking. But you can easily imagine a
scenario where this is used and it seems to work.
Either there's just sort of a you know, the psycho
somatic effect of someone thinking that you're you're healing them

(25:35):
and they just puts them at ease a little bit
and then they heal naturally, or you know, it's just
kind of the roll of the dice. You think of
the imperfect medical understanding of the time, poor wound treatment, uh,
confirmation bias. And it just sort of the idea too,
that just the mere fact that anyone's giving, you know,
some amount, just the fact that you're changing the dressings

(25:57):
so that you can dip the dressings in this magical
powder might might play a role. Oh yeah, totally. I mean,
I think that's often the case with a lot of
these magical treatments, is that in many cases they might
have actually done something helpful, but it was just an
unnecessary byproduct of what they thought they were doing. Yeah,
so we're we're left with the situation then, where Yeah,

(26:18):
this idea of the powder of sympathies out there, it's
it's not working, but it may seem to work in
some cases, and the the idea remains somewhat popular. So
that leaves the question if enough people believe that the
powder of sympathy is working or maybe working, or there's
something to it to the magic here, what else can

(26:38):
you do with it? Could you perhaps tackle one of
the most pressing challenges of the day is this where
longitude comes back in exactly and again longitude is east
west positioning and latitude is north south, and in navigating
by c it pays to know exactly where you are. Now,
all you need is a peek at the altitude of

(26:59):
the noonday sun one and a few glances at a
table that gives the sons a declination for the day,
and then you've got your latitude. So it's not so
hard to know how far north or south you are, right,
but at the time to calculate longitude one hand to
depend largely on what's known as dead reckoning. Oh boy,
that sounds good. Yeah, this is calculating your current position

(27:21):
based on your previous position. Uh and uh and uh
and and known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.
Oh wait a second, so that's not as cool as
I imagine. It's not like using a skull holding it
up to the sky in a certain way. No, now,
you're just talking about something that sounds very approximate and
often wrong. Right. It's you end up it's rife with

(27:42):
cumulative errors. So essentially what you're doing here is like
the first time that you like each leg of the trip,
each point uh you know, on on the on the map. Um,
it gets gets the further out you get, You're you're
a little more prone to air. It's kind of like
a game of telephone, right when you start with one
word spoken whispered into ears, and it goes around in

(28:03):
a circle, and by the end it may or may
not resemble the original word. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying, like,
you know, you started at fifty degrees west, and then
you say, well, I think we went maybe about a
hundred miles west today, so we're at this new point west.
And then I think maybe we went about a hundred

(28:24):
miles the next day. So you think, but each time
you do that, you're reckoning from your previous guests about
how far west you were right, And then you're you
also have to factor in what kind of tools do
I have to measure these things? Can I can accurately gauge, like,
truly accurately gauge how far I've come? Do I do
I have an accurate understanding of what time it is? Uh?

(28:47):
These become issues. Oh and I should also note you
also need an accurate longitude latitude reading to make up
for an up to ten degree difference in magnetic north
versus true north on certain trade route. Okay, okay, So
by the sixteenth century we had a pretty good method
for determining longitude by land, depending on the use of

(29:09):
Galilee and moons of Jupiter as an astronomical clock. But
this was far more difficult to carry out by sea,
so you needed a better method. Is it going to
be magic, Uh, we're gonna get to a Yeah, we're
gonna get to some magic here. Now, not everybody trying
to tackle this problem was trying to tackle with magic.
There's a great deal of terrestrial, celestial, and mechanical solutions

(29:32):
that were making the rounds. And this was also a
stirred on by the fact that there was there at
least a couple of hefty prizes, the most notable being
that offered by the British government in seventeen four team
the Longitude Prize. So there's there's there's not only fame
and the solution of a problem at stake here, there's
also a cash reward. You could already be a winner

(29:53):
if you have some magic powder. Yeah. So enter an
anonymous author. We have we have no idea who this was,
but they printed a pamphlet titled Curious Inquiries being six
Brief discourses. Uh. Now, a great many commentators insist that
this entire pamphlet is just a work of satire, poking

(30:15):
fun as scientific practice. It's kind of a mad magazine
or even you know, maybe a more more opt to
comparison would be a modest proposal, right, Jonathan Swift. The
idea being here that we should we should eat the poor, Yes, yeah,
but not everybody agrees that it was definitely satire. So
in the book Longitude, there's the true story of a
loan genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of this time.

(30:37):
Historian Davis Sobel says that it's more difficult to determine
if the pamphlet prevent presents the idea as a serious
solution or a mere satire. So it's not necessarily clear, right,
which one it's supposed to be. Yeah, it kind of
It just depends on who the commentator is. Then that
sounds like the perfect zone for comedy. Yes, and and
I do have to before we get into the grizzly

(30:58):
details here and let everyone know that there's no evidence
that anyone ever actually tried this out, Uh, but it's
been makes for an interesting discussion point here. So the
solution that's proposed in this pamphlet depends entirely on the
powder of sympathy. You take a wounded dog with you
to see, and you leave someone back home on shore

(31:19):
to dip the dog's bandage into the sympathy solution every
day at noon. This will cause the dog you yelp
out in pain. Informing you that quote the sun is
upon the Meridan in London. Compare that hour to the
local time and you can now calculate longitude. Now, this

(31:39):
whole thing would depend not only on sympathetic magic, but
also on the effect working across thousands of miles. Uh,
and also without the dog healing, because I remember, the
whole scenario is that the powder of sympathy can be
used to to treat, to heal the wound, to heal
the wound by treating the weapon or the dressing, And
in this case you are just hoping to keep the

(32:01):
dog's misery going. So navigate. Yeah, that's horrible, and so
this might actually require additional injuries to the dog. So
I gotta admit I was reading about this last night
a little bit, and I had my dog sitting next
to me on the couch, and I felt so sad.
It is it's a even if I mean I'm not
a dog owner, but this is a horrific notion. And yet,

(32:21):
as a Sobell points out, the author of the pamphlet
goes on to state that quote, submitting a dog to
the misery of having always a wound about him is
no more macabre or a mercenary than expecting a seaman
to put his own eye out for the purpose of navigation. Now,
now what does that mean? So they were like stabbing
sailor's eye so they could be good navigating. This sounds

(32:42):
like just another level of of of grotesque magic. But uh,
she explains. English navigator John Davies had this this backstaff
that he developed in and this improved on an older
cross staff or Jacob's staff, and this was used, um uh,
this was what was required to measure the height of

(33:03):
the sun above the horizon, uh, in navigation. And you
do it by looking directly into the glare of the
sun with only a darkened bit of glass to protect you.
And so just a few years of this was enough
to destroy that, you know, one's eyesight in your favorite eye.
So you have a lot of of you know, the
older sailors about and they'd be blind in one eye
from using this method at the time. Now, I don't

(33:24):
think that I don't know about the argument that this
is is the same thing as torturing a dog, especially
in the name of magic, as opposed to simply, you know,
making solar observations. But there you go. It's in the pample.
The takeaway from today's episode is staring at the sun
it works, gets results. Okay, so let's answer the obvious question. Uh,

(33:48):
why didn't this work? Assuming you mean the powder of
the powder of sympathy? Why why did this not work?
Why was this this dog option? Uh, not even remotely
feasible because it involves of magic powder exactly. Yeah, it
has no basis in science or the natural laws of
the universe as we understand them. Now, some of you

(34:08):
might be thinking, oh, well, this is this is what
I've seen described as a spooky action at a distance.
Isn't there something in quantum mechanics that says that you
can have two items become a quantumly entangled, two particles
come into contact, and as a result, any change to
one of the particles creates an instantaneous change in the other. Yeah,

(34:29):
this is a phenomenon and quantum mechanics the idea of entanglement,
where if two particles are entangled, you can separate them
across vast distances. You can take them, you know, opposite
ends of the galaxy, and then supposedly looking at one
of these particles will instantaneously tell you something about the
state of the other. Um. Now, I've actually I've read

(34:51):
criticisms of the idea that this can be used to enable,
for example, faster than light communication, because you automatically assume,
m oh wow. So if you could do that, you
could take them to opposite ends of the galaxy and
they still have an influence on one another, then couldn't
you use that to send messages instantaneously from one end

(35:11):
to the galaxy to the other. The physicists that I've
read say, no, that is not possible. You still cannot
send information faster than light. Uh, there are there are
facts about how the system works that means that. That
means that you can't encode information in one in a
way that can be received at the other end. So

(35:32):
even even are even the scientific ideas that we have
today that most resemble sympathetic magic could not work as
we understand them within these parameters. No, because they're not
sympathetic magic their quantum intent. Alright, So our next question
what if it had worked well on one hand as

(35:53):
umberto echo rights in the Island of the day before.
I mean, imagine anyone who's read that book, you were
already familiar with the powder or sympathy and this this
dog angle from that. If this had worked, you would
have had a world where global trade and travel depends
on the torment of dogs. So this is the alternate
history we're being asked to consider here. Yeah, just kind
of horrific magical alternate reality. But then that's the thing.

(36:17):
If if the dog trick works, and that means the
powder of sympathy works, that means that any number of
sympathetic magical scenarios are also true, And it just opens
the Pandora's box of of magical possibility and magical complication
of life. Of course it does. I mean, if magic

(36:39):
is magic, then I don't know how to finish that sentence. Yeah, well,
I mean everything is different then, yeah, I mean you
have you know, magical spies running around, Voodoo dolls are
are just like everybody has a voodoo dogs just a
growth industry. You're gonna have one for everybody. You know,
just to make it's like a cold war of voodoo

(36:59):
for everybody. Now, one thing I do want to point
out about the kind of magic you're talking about is,
if we go back to my earlier distinction between magical
law magic that operates by law and has consistent results
versus capricious magic, this would seem to be something that's
more like magical law right there there, insisting that this
would work every time. It would be a dependable principle

(37:22):
of nature. Oh yeah, it would have to be, otherwise
you wouldn't be able to base navigation around it. Because again,
this was this was life and death like that. That
was the I can't really stress that enough that that
was the whole reason for this, this quest for a
solution to the longitude problem. So it's not like you're
praying to one of the gods to make the dog
on your ship give you the longitude correctly, and it

(37:44):
may work or it may not. Their idea was if
if anybody actually believed this. The idea was that this
could be depended on and in that sense, maybe it
wouldn't actually change all that much other than it would
make the world a much worse place because of all
these people cutting dogs. But it wouldn't change all that
much in terms of our understanding of reality because it
would still be yet another dependable principle. Yeah now, and

(38:09):
I imagine everyone's wondering at this point, Okay, well, what
actually solved the problem? How did we actually uh figure
out a way to accurately determine a longitude? Fun fact,
nobody knew how far they were easter or west until
they had iPhones. Well there's actually there's actually something to that,
but um, the main individual that's credited with it was

(38:32):
solving the problem initially is that eighteenth century clockmaker John Harrison.
So he created the first clock that was accurate enough
to determine longitude at sea, most notably here that the
Jeffreys Watch and the Sea Watch, which is also known
as H four. And this revolutionized a navigation and greatly
improve the safety of sea travel. And then after that

(38:53):
we had other technological advances. They would introduce wireless time
signals sent by telegraphy radar, the radio based Lauren system,
and of course GPS technology. Alright, that's the big one.
And again coming back to your your comming on iPhones,
like once we once we have the GPS in place
like that. That certainly just fixes everything in terms of

(39:14):
knowing where you are in the world and moving around anyway.
So please just confirmed to us we we don't know
any evidence of dogs actually being tortured for navigation. That
didn't happen in reality, as far as we know, as
far as I know, it did not happen, and certainly
do not try it, because you're a monster. If you do, well,
I feel much better now now we cannot say the

(39:36):
same with the with the with definite accuracy for rabbits.
And that's what we're gonna we're gonna get to next.
After a break, all right, we're back. So we're gonna,
we're gonna, we're gonna transport ourselves in time. Now we're
gonna we're gonna move on up to the twenty century,
all right, So we're gonna chase the connection between UH

(40:00):
seafaring navigation or seafaring communication and blood magic. Yes, to
the modern era, that's right, that's right. So inevitably we're
talking about military matters and military research here, and UH
military interests have always pushed technological advancements. I mean in
weaponry obviously, but also in everything from food storage to

(40:22):
communication and in times of war, and certainly in times
of total war. Uh, this has a way of of
of even absorbing non military explorations. I mean, just consider
German rocketry. During the Second World War. You had all
these minds that in many cases had dreamed of space exploration,
and they were maneuvered into developing, uh, weapons of mass
destruction instead, such as the the V weapons like the

(40:44):
V two rockets. And after the flames of the Second
World War died down, of course, the Cold War set in.
The race was on to to perfect one's weaponry, to
advance to a state of superiority over your rival superpower.
And with nothing short of nuclear war haunting the horizon,
what wouldn't you try? What a riskier, even unlikely avenues

(41:07):
wouldn't you explore in hopes of gaining that upper hand. Yeah,
I think sometimes it's easy for us today to look
back on on Cold War myopia, on the you know,
the behavior of the leadership in both the Western Powers
and in the Soviet Union, and to kind of and
to I don't know, think like, wow, how paranoid and

(41:30):
stupid they were. Now I'm not saying that they necessarily
behaved wisely I think in most cases they probably didn't
yet during the Cold War, it's uh, if you put
yourself back in the past during the Cold War and
you take away the fact that you know how everything
turned out, it's easy to understand why people were highly

(41:54):
motivated by fear and and and and as we're going
to be discussing the with the scientific exploration of essentially
paranormal phenomenon, uh, you know, this is a this is
an area where you can also make that make the argument, well,
had that had the slimy and the slime mold tentacle
of science really truly explored that cavern? Well, and how

(42:15):
do we know for sure that this kind of this
this part of the maze doesn't lead to the food reward.
I mean, one of the things about the slime Mold
of Science not having any top down control means that sometimes, uh,
one one tendril might not know what the other tendrils
are doing, right, Uh. Is so one tendril might be
creeping down an avenue that is in fact a dead

(42:38):
end and has been explored before, or might be creeping
down some avenue in secret, so that other tendrils might
not know what it's doing because it's exploring some some
cavern in secret. And that's something we we often get
in the development of military and defense technology. Right and
of course our our our example, our metaphor of the

(42:58):
slime mold is science is kind of the ideal shape
of science. But in times of war, you may have
someone come in and say, actually, I'm going to be
the king of science right now, Hey, get this tendral
down this hallway because I really need this to work,
or I think it could work. But boss, that's a
bad hallway. It doesn't work, it doesn't matter. It starts
sending slim down there, and we'll we'll worry about it

(43:20):
and uh, you know, five to ten years. Okay, So
the hallway we're gonna be talking about in this section
is going to be parapsychology, right right, And we see
this plan in the history of both US and Soviet experimentation. Uh,
you know, looking into parapsychology and specifically mind control being
a big one. Uh. DARPA uh certainly explored the possibilities.

(43:41):
You had Sydney Gottlieb, who was head of the Office
of Technical Service at the CIA, and he spearheaded such
projects as MK Ultra, which I imagine a number of
you familiar with this is the project that explored the
possibilities of l s D enabled mind control. Yeah, we
explored that a little bit, I think definitely in the
episode where we talked about what mind control would feel

(44:02):
like if it were possible. That's right, we did. And
then of course the Soviets were conducting their own experiments. Uh.
And this, now, this is a situation where we don't
always have the best primary sources on what exactly was
going on. It's kind of there's a game of telephone
going on here. There's kind of a situation of dead

(44:23):
reckoning with the reporting of what the Soviets were actually
up to. Yeah. Now, as far as U. S. Intelligence services,
we do now have some declassified documents and still have
parts redacted in some cases and all that. But uh,
but yeah, we have descriptions now what was going on
for example in the c i A. Yeah. But meanwhile
with the Soviets, there's some areas where we have less information.

(44:45):
For instance, there's the study combiled by the Rand Corporation
for DARPA, and they make special mention of Russia's plan
to launch psychics into orbit into orbit. Yeah, in spaceships
or just naked. Um, I assume in space ships, but
I'm thinking of psychic space gods just flying naked through
space looking down over the prairies of the United States. Well,

(45:07):
there is a certain guild navigator vibe. It is for
sure totally So the quote from this particular report is
regarding a precognition. We found only one unverified report by
a Soviet investigator that a program was being planned to
train astronauts to quote foresee and to avoid accidents in space.
What it was clear from the context that he was

(45:28):
referring to precognitive process. Now, hold on a second. If
you were developing in the Cold War context, you've got
projects somewhere deep in your defense research agencies to develop
precognition where you know what's going to happen before it happens,
would you really primarily think to employ it by having

(45:50):
astronauts look into the future to make sure there's not
going to be an accident during their space mission. That
just doesn't seem like the primary way that people would
put this use. Yeah, I mean, it makes you ask
is as true as as false? Is this Russian disinformation
certainly could be certainly saying Hey, what are we up
to while we're shooting psychics into space? You better get

(46:11):
on that. Think about that and not this, uh, this, this,
this other thing that we're working on. It's actually a
legitimate threat. Yeah, I mean that's a big thing when
you're considering defense capabilities in the Cold War context, not
just Cold War, I mean throughout the history of of
you know, great powers interacting with one another. But it's
certainly there in the Cold War. Is that a lot

(46:31):
of capability that was developed, or capability that was just
talked about, was not necessarily for the purpose of executing
that capability in a real scenario, but was for the
purpose of provoking some kind of impression or behavior on
the other side. So, if you're doing research for some
kind of US defense or security agency, you might want

(46:55):
to put out reports creating the impression for the Soviets
that you have some kind of capability you don't really have,
just because you want them to react to it in
a certain way, and vice versa. Yeah. Like another example
that was brought up in that same Randah paper was
the idea that one might be able to use psychokinesis

(47:16):
to disrupt an intercontinental ballistic missiles electronic guidance system. Yeah,
so that, like imagine it, the the the nuclear death
is coming down in the form of this warhead, and
then all this psychic soldier needs to do is look
up at it, concentrate just right, and click something inside it.
So they've detected a launch. The president immediately picks up

(47:38):
the phone, dials up the Long Island medium. Yeah, exactly,
get her on the k those must get those missiles
out of the air. Now. Of course, researchers, researchers were
ultimately on both sides interested in all forms of extrasensory perception.
We you know, we have we have documents and releases
on things like tele epathy, claric clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, um,

(48:02):
voluntary nervous system control, faith healing, the use of dowsing
rods and UH and UH and dermo optics, UH, the
ability to, for instance, to see with one's own hands,
that sort of thing. So there was a lot of
stuff that was at least, uh, at least looked into,
if not you know, thoroughly explored. And of course this,

(48:25):
this whole scene is tremendously interesting, and we could devote
multiple podcast to just its exploration. But Robert, I know
you want to talk about cutting animals. Yes, that that's
our focus here today is the the use of blood
magic in a in a nautical sense. Well, okay, So
one source that we looked at that I thought was
pretty interesting was this article by a national security journalist

(48:48):
named Sharon Weinberger. And so this article was published in
I Tripolice Spectrum, I think just a month or so ago.
But it's from a book called The Imagineers of War,
so it's an adapted chapter and the article was called
the Bunny the Witch in the War Room. I like that. Yeah, yeah,
the C. S. Lewis connection, establishing a little bit of

(49:10):
which would that be homeopathic or contagious magic? With C. S.
Lewis guess homeopathic? Yeah, I think so. Now some of
you may have heard Weinberger because she was recently a
guest on NPRS Fresh Air, which he talks about about
about this book and about uh, this particular chapter here,
and Weinberger points out that in the US a lot
of this this zeal for paranormal research, uh, it came

(49:31):
together in the wake of the nine seven Soviet sput
Nick launch. So Washington ends up moving after this to
prioritize research via the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
That this was the first space agency, and it is
the entity that becomes DARPA. Yeah, And to get into
the relevant part of Winburger's article. So you, Robert, you
already mentioned this guy, Sydney Gottlieb, who was apparently quite

(49:54):
a character. He was a chemist by original training, but
he was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Office
of Technical Service. I think you already mentioned that division
earlier in the early nineteen seventies. In in the early
nineteen seventies, this division had contracted the Stanford Research Institute

(50:15):
to carry out a program of experiments in the field
of parapsychology, which we already mentioned. A parapsychology is paranormal
psychic phenomena. So some of the stuff we've already mentioned, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition,
remote viewing. I think they were specially into remote viewing
because it was like it was like having a spy
plane that could go inside an enemy base and just

(50:37):
see what was on anybody's desk and all that. If
it actually worked. And of course this is something that's
explored in a lot of uh science fiction treatments, including
a Stranger Thing so or a firestarter. Yeah. You know,
anytime you have a shadowy government lab, you often find
echoes of of this of these experiments there, right, So

(50:58):
it's obvious that if there were anything real to be
discovered in this arena, like if there is anything to parapsychology,
of course it would be of tremendous use to military
and intelligence agencies. So the the director of the of
our PAT at the time, the Advanced Research Projects Agency
in the early nineteen seventies, Stephen Luca Sik, recalls going

(51:20):
to visit Sydney Gottlieb in nineteen seventy one, and apparently
one of the subjects Scott Lee wanted to talk about
with talked talked to him about was bunnies stead bunnies
and their use in strategic nuclear arms positioning around the world. Now,
in nineteen seventy a book had been released in the

(51:42):
United States called Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by
Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder, and this book claimed to
document the findings of Soviet research into psychic phenomena such
as esp. It was saying, look the Soviets are already
making great strides in parapsychology. They're already figuring out how

(52:03):
to do all the CSP stuff, and this apparently spurred
these American officials to get into the game. Now, I
haven't read this book, but I did a little reading
about it, looking at some of the things that appear
to be talked about in it, some things reviewers have said,
and admitting that I haven't read the book, it looks
to me very sketchy. It looks to me like this

(52:25):
book perhaps fraudulently reports or at least credulous. Lee passes
on reports of EESP results as if they're genuine. Now,
maybe I hope I'm being fair. Maybe I'm not being fair,
And if I got into it, the authors would show
a little little bit more skepticism. But I'm um, I'm
a little bit wary of anything that is passed on

(52:46):
as true from the contents of this book. Just at
first glance, now you might be thinking, wait a minute,
where do the bunnies come in. Well, according to the
allegations in this book by by Ostrander and Schroeder, one
experiment used a supposed psychic connection between mothers and recently
born infant mammals to establish communication across difficult physical barriers. Specifically,

(53:13):
this involved nuclear submarines. Now, in the Cold War, strategic
defense for both the United States and the Soviet Union
meant being able to offer a credible threat of nuclear
retaliation in the event of an act of war. So
you might ask somebody, wait a minute, you know, if
we don't want to start a world war and kill everybody,

(53:34):
why do we need nuclear weapons? And the reasoning at
the time given by both powers was well, we need
them as a credible threat of retaliation to prevent the
other side from attacking us first. And one of the
most important things that you could do in order to
make sure that you had retaliatory power was to make

(53:54):
sure that you had some hidden weapons. So you might
have ground based weapons all over the place is but
the enemy might know where some of those are. You know,
you never know how good the spying is. But if
you could launch missiles from a deep water submarine, there's
you know you could keep. You could move them all
over the place in secret, and the enemy wouldn't be

(54:15):
able to take out all of your capabilities, so you
could always retaliate. And the submarines could always stay hidden
as long as they stayed submerged deep in the ocean.
And this is where we get the idea of these
these nuclear subs with nuclear missiles going out and essentially
just hanging out in the ocean in case they are needed.
But this sort of defeated the purpose because if you

(54:37):
wanted your slb ms as they were known submarine launched
ballistic missiles to respond quickly to an attack, you would
need to be able to have rapid wireless communication with
your nuclear subs, right, you need to get the message
out to them that it's time to retaliate. It wasn't
easy to get a message to these crafts submerged so
deep underwater. And one leeged Soviet solution, according to Ostrander

(55:02):
and Schroeder, was psychic rabbit research. So the theory went
something like this, You've got an inherent psychic link that's
created between the brain of a mother and her immediate offspring.
If a baby rabbit is killed, supposedly, it's mother will
be able to know this instantly, even at a great distance.

(55:23):
So hypothetically you could keep a mother rabbit in a
cage on a submarine and keep its baby back at
the home base. And if you needed your nuclear sub
to rise up to the shallows in order to receive
orders to execute a launch, you would just kill the
baby rabbit. Now immediately the mother should start showing symptoms
of distress. And note that's kind of a vague work like,

(55:46):
what does distress look like in a rabbit? Rabbit not
only a rabbit, a rabbit that's kept on a submarine, right,
it would know psychically that it's baby had perished, and
this would mean the person watching over the rabbit on
the submarine would signal the officers and the sub would
rise to the proper depth to receive orders. Now, according
to Austrander and Schroeder, the Soviets claim their experiments were

(56:09):
successful and the technique worked. I doubt it, yeah, I
just we'll discuss. I just can't imagine that scenario in
which this works. So I'm skeptical at multiple levels of this.
I don't know whether they actually did this or not.
It's reported that they did this, but I'm skeptical of
the reports. Uh. And of course, even if they did

(56:30):
actually try it and claim that it worked, I don't
believe them. Yeah, though I do like the story of
this in how it reveals kind of a lunacy of
of nuclear war and retaltory attacks, you know, and and
and certainly goes along rather nicely or frighteningly with various

(56:50):
stories we have about like near incidents of of false launches. Yeah, God,
those are terrified. Uh. And it's it's arry how close
we've come in some scenarios to an accidental nuclear war. Uh.
You know, the worst possible outcome that there could be
on planet Earth would be a nuclear exchange. And and

(57:11):
it's it's terrifying to think that such a thing could
happen without incredibly deliberate I mean, it's terrifying to think
it could happen for any reason. But it's just added
absurdity that it could happen by accident. Yeah, and even
more absurdity to say it could happen because you misinterpreted
a distressed rabbit on a submarine. Right now, Hopefully what

(57:32):
they had in mind, if anybody was actually thinking about
implementing something like this, would be more what I talked about,
not that you'd see a distressed rabbit and you just launch,
but that you'd see a distressed rabbit, and that would
mean Okay, come up from the deep water so you
can receive a signal and then you'd get your complete
orders once you were at the surface. Right, So like

(57:52):
if this, if this were utilized by the Soviets, you
could also imagine a scenario we have like a Soviet
sleeper agent hanging out in an apartment like cleaning guns
and looking after a pet rabbit and the rabbits distressed
and he's like, oh, I've got to go to the
pay phone across town and await my call to see
who I'm supposed to assassinate. Wait, so there would be
multiple levels of rabbits there. Oh no, wait, no, he

(58:15):
wouldn't be communicating with a submarine that it would just
be the rabbit, right, This would just the rabbit used
as a means of communicating with you between agents and
so in the US, getting rid of the number stations
or you know, secret radio communications, just have rabbit. Yeah,
it is this factor into the Americans at all. You've
you've been telling me that I need to watch to
pick up the Americans again, Like, I haven't gotten to

(58:37):
any rabbits if they're in there. But I'm not done
with the series yet. The series isn't over yet, but
I've not gotten any rabbits anyway. So reports ofsp research
in the Soviet Union did help sort of create this
climate of fear in US defense research circles. It's what
we've talked about. It's the sort of I don't know,
you might almost call it like conflict jealousy, you know,

(58:59):
it's like advantage paranoia. If the Soviets are gonna have
psychic assassins, shouldn't we have them too. If their remote viewing,
shouldn't we be doing some remote viewing as well. The
Soviets have have our training clowning troops. If they have
clown troops, we've got to have clown troops to start recruiting.
But obviously, I mean, I think you'll probably agree with

(59:20):
me that I doubt any either side ever had any
real success at anything like this, And I almost doubt
how deep the research actually went on either side. I mean,
I think you might get a few stories of some
research on this, but they it probably didn't take them
too long to figure out on both sides, however deep

(59:40):
they went, that this was nonsense and it was never
gonna work. Yeah, I guess you have to ask yourself like,
imagine wherever you work, imagine a bad idea, like an
untotally unworkable idea, coming down from management. How long can
that initiative live within your organization depends on how delusional
management is. So and actually, no, that's a good point,

(01:00:01):
because I can see that being a problem, for example,
in your business scenario, if management does not respond well
to negative feedback of criticism, as sometimes governments don't, especially
totalitarian governments. Imagine you are a Soviet scientist and you
you're you're proper early you're exhibiting proper scientific skepticism, but
you get orders from the top down telling you you

(01:00:23):
need to figure out how to make psychic communication work
for spies. You're like, Okay, I know that's not real.
But if I tell my boss that I might just
go to the Gulag, right, I've I've got to at
least look like I'm I'm throwing due diligence at the problem. Yeah.
And of course we know from from other instances that
the Soviet Union was not uh not immune to being

(01:00:46):
totally anti science for political reasons. I mean, I think
about like a like sinco ism, right, this this completely
non scientific idea about biology and agriculture pushed like this
sky trophimal sinko. Uh that they that they tried to implement.
They tried to just make it science by force, say like, yes,
this is what science is now. But you know it

(01:01:08):
wasn't true anyway. Back to the end of the story,
So US defense and Intel research on parapsychology went down
a lot of weird rabbit holes, so to speak. I
had a bad pun. But the the ar per researcher
George Lawrence, who had been assigned to work on the
parapsychology research, later said, quote, I worked so long and

(01:01:29):
so hard and dealt with so many fools and Charlatan's
there is no question in my mind that all of
it is bunk, all right, So much of the pretty
much all of it didn't work. And in this case,
the rabbit scenario, if it was even truly attempted, obviously
didn't work. But why doesn't it work? Well, I mean,

(01:01:50):
how would it work? So I want to say effects
in the world, if you can make a change in something,
if you can cause an effect, it always appears to
be mediated by the transfer of energy. In order to
send a signal, you've got to direct some form of
energy or matter transfer that makes a change in your
environment something you can detect. So, uh, you know, talking

(01:02:14):
transfers acoustic energy back and forth. Writing a letter is
storage on physical matter. You have to spend energy to
move at one place to another. You can transmit by
radio waves, that's energy. When you're talking about psychic transmission,
you're proposing that information is being transmitted from one place
to another with no known quantity of energy being exchanged

(01:02:36):
in between. And first of all, that just doesn't drive
with anything we know about science. But also I want
to just roll with the idea of maybe psychic energy
is real, okay, And I want to just accept that
as a hypothetical for for a second and apply some
critical thinking to it. Maybe you tell me if I'm
being overly pedantic here, but I've got a prediction if

(01:02:59):
psychic powers are real, if we do discover that, for example,
humans or rabbits can wirelessly share thoughts with one another,
I would think the effectiveness of this information transfer would
have to be mediated by physical distance. Because if you're
transmitting something between people's brains, think about your head like

(01:03:19):
an antenna, and antenna transmits omnidirectionally. And because of that,
the further you get away from the antenna, much greatly
proportionally weaker the signal is. It works by the inverse
square law. So the further you get away, the much
weaker the signal becomes, and eventually it's going to become
indistinguishable from whatever other noise is floating around in the

(01:03:43):
ether around you. So I don't see how you could
have a psychic connection between a mother rabbit and a
baby rabbit. Even if such psychic connections are possible, they
would really be detectable across hundreds of feet of ocean
water and you know thou sens of kilometers. Well, and yeah,
it also comes down to the fact that, like, why

(01:04:04):
would it need to be that strong? If this were
if this were an actual, essentially biological reality, it would
be an involved biological reality. What purpose would it serve? Yeah,
and we we know too that evolution weeds out, um,
you know, unnecessary energy expenditures. The claw on the crab
is only going to be as big as it needs

(01:04:26):
to be. So, like and under what scenario would rabbits
have evolved to deal with not only the you know,
the kidnapping of young but the but the transport of
that young across the globe and then deep under the sea.
That it doesn't it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, okay,
well maybe we we've got to get to your alternate

(01:04:48):
history hypothetical magic here. We already sort of have explored
this a little bit basically the same answer. Yeah, what
what would have happened if the Soviets in fact discovered
it is real? You can d communicate with submarines via
via rabbits and you had to kill baby rabbits, which
also makes me very sad to think about. How would

(01:05:08):
history be different, Well, I mean a rabbit on every submarine.
It would mean that you have psychic spies, precaga, astronaut cosmonauts,
remote viewing and remote writing is just a standard espionage tool.
And then the other thing is that, uh, you know,
how how does all of this uh this uh, this
newfound uh psychic technology, how does it all remain just

(01:05:30):
within the government that doesn't end up trickling down to
the private sector as well? Do you end up having
a precog in every corporation, a scanner cop and every
police precinct I hope So, so obviously that didn't come
to pass, So we don't even have to consider it,
but it's it's it's basically the same answer as in
a previous question. If this had been true, then what

(01:05:50):
else would have been true? And it would have just
completely changed our world? It would it would just be
magic or psychic phenomenon just utilized in every interest. Though
I do want to point out if this were true again,
it would follow the laws of magic as opposed to
the capricious magic, or it wouldn't be useful, right, like
if you if it's capricious magic that allows psychic connection

(01:06:14):
between mother rabbits and baby rabbits, it would not be
a dependable tool for communicating with your submarine officers if
it only worked at a random amount per cent of
the time. Right, it has to work every time, otherwise
it cannot be part of your your your your country's
you know, defense protocol. Yeah, it has to work every
time or a predictably high percent of the time. Um. Yeah.

(01:06:37):
And so if it's just capricious, it's just apparently at random,
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, like there's somebody up
there making random decisions about it. Then this does just
sort of become a part of science, right. We study
the phenomenon. We discover when it works, when it doesn't work,
at what rate it works, and it becomes just part
of the known laws of reality, even if we don't

(01:06:58):
understand the mechanism. That's true. Now, obviously the blood magic
with rabbits thing didn't didn't shake out. How did that?
How did science step in and solve this problem? Well,
this is actually kind of interesting, I think. So by
the time the Cold War, obviously we had radio transmissions,
wireless radio where we could talk to submarines. That way,
if they were at the surface of the water. Right,

(01:07:20):
you go up to the surface, you put up a
radio antenna, we can talk to you. But that sort
of defeats the purpose of a submarine. Right you come
up to the surface of the water, put up your antenna.
You are suddenly detectable to enemy enemy forces. Um. So
the problem was that standard radio waves could not penetrate
deep oceans to reach deep sea subs um And yeah,

(01:07:43):
the question is was there any way to signal them
without killing rabbits and without forcing them to rise to
the surface and reveal themselves. So the problem with penetrating
deep sea water is that electromagnetic radiation, which is what
we used to transmit radio waves is attenuated by sea
wall water because seawater is a reasonably good electrical conductor,

(01:08:05):
sort of similar to how radio waves will have a
hard time penetrating a shield of conductive metal. Right, you
can put a shield of conductive metal around you and
prevent radio signals from getting to your cell phone or
to your brain or whatever. And it's standard frequencies. A
signal just can't get very far under the ocean. But
the extent to which a radio signal is attenuated is

(01:08:27):
determined by the frequency of the transmission. The lower the frequency,
the deeper it goes into the water. So how low
would we need to make the frequency to get down
to deep sea subs? Apparently you have to go really,
really low. And this is where we meet my friend ELF. Ah,
So the elves step in and solve everything. So we

(01:08:47):
do have a medical solution. It in fact is no,
it's not. ELF stands for extremely low frequency. So FM radio,
for example, operates on the scale of tens to hundreds
of mega hurts in the radio frequency omega. Omega hurts
is a million hurts. On the other hand, ELF transmissions

(01:09:08):
occur at a scale of tens of hurts. So this
is literally millions of times lower frequency than FM radio.
And as you know, frequency and wavelength are inversely correlated,
right the the lower your frequency, the longer your wavelength.
So we're talking about massive, massive, huge waves of electromagnetic energy.

(01:09:31):
You might also know that if you want to generate
a massively long wavelength, you need a massively big antenna.
And in the in the idea of e l F transmission,
these generally because you couldn't build an an antenna this big,
it was ridiculous of standard metal antenna. So instead what
you had to do was essentially put together the form

(01:09:51):
of extremely long assemblies of wires hung up on poles.
And we're talking like dozens of miles long. And I've
actually seen varying reports the length of these wires of
the two known e l F transmitters in the United States.
And I don't know if these varying reports reflect different
stages on the project or just confusion or misreporting or what.

(01:10:13):
But and definitely in the realm of dozens of miles long,
if not longer. But anyway, the United States supposedly had
these two stations for e l F SU subcomms and
It was one in clam Lake, Wisconsin, another one in Republic, Michigan.
But what these things would do is have these huge
long wires on poles that would sort of use the

(01:10:35):
Earth itself as an antenna, and then it would bounce
this ELF signal off the ionosphere and then back down
into the water, and then it would reach the sub
of course, at great at great depth. Like that communication
is one way. There's no way for the submarine to
signal back. Also, communications transmitted by extremely low frequency had

(01:10:57):
to be extremely simple because bandwidth is very low with
that frequency. This is interesting. Basically we have an answer
here that uses actual science, but that kind of has
the same relationship. You couldn't. All you could do would
be to signal the sub and make them reach a
position where they could be you could communicate with them. Yeah,
basically you can say like, all right, come up for orders,

(01:11:18):
it's time. Uh. Now. There were reports a few years back.
Obviously things have developed since the late twentieth century. There
were a few reports I read from I think around
two thousand ten or so where lockeed Martin was developing
a program called communications at Speed in Depth, and this
would use different combinations of things to enable different types
of communication. One would be antenna booey's attached to submarines

(01:11:43):
by cables that are several miles long, and this would
allow subs to communicate both ways while staying deep and
operating at normal speed. Another option was something I thought
was interesting. It was an acoustic to r F booy system.
So here the submarine launches a buoy or a plane
drops a booy. Either way you've got a communication buoy
on the surface with the radio antenna on it. But

(01:12:05):
then the buoy communicates with the submarine via acoustic transmission
sound waves in the water which travel through the water
fine over long distances, so that you have it, no
dead rabbits required, as far as we know now. Now,
who knows what happened when they're installing those giant antennas
out in the Wisconsin and Michigan wilderness. I know. I

(01:12:26):
think there was some environmentalist opposition to like the Reagan
administration wanting to do some various ELF communication projects. So
I cannot say honestly that no rabbits were harmed in
the making of this film, but at least they weren't
killing baby rabbits to communicate with mother rabbits in a
cage in the red room. All right, Well, you know,

(01:12:49):
as we as we begin to close out here, I
do want to throw in one more a little tidbit
here from from Sharon Weinberger. We have decided earlier. She
points out that while the world of blood magic, submarine communication,
and psychic soldier didn't come to pass, George Lawrence, the
DARPA program manager that we mentioned earlier, he was super

(01:13:10):
into this idea of brain computer interfaces. So she shares this,
This is extra from the Fresh Air interview. He was
part of this new age counterculture, which even at DARPA
was unusual at the time. He kind of belonged to
the zeitgeist, and he was excited by the idea of
communicating directly with the human brain. But rather than doing
it through magicians or bunny rabbits, he said, suppose we

(01:13:31):
can do it through computers. Now, I remember what I
said earlier about using telepathy and and psychokinesis uh to uh,
you know, to manipulate I CBMs, or indeed, to establish
a quasi uh symbiotic relationship between a human brain and
computing equipment. Well, essentially what he did, uh And in

(01:13:53):
the midst of all of this, uh, this magic and
essentially you know, nonsense. I guess you could say he
ended up laying the foundation for the field of brain
computer interface and bio cybernetic computing, the very field that
you and I discussed at length in our in our
podcast episode Brain to Brain the Science of technotelepathy, and
we've also discussed in our recent neuro security episode. Yeah, yeah,

(01:14:14):
it came up there as well. So it's it's it's
kind of funny, right, because that kind of technology. I
think we even commented on it when we were we
were we were discussing it. It sounds a bit like magic,
doesn't it. It makes me think. There's a line in
William Gibson's Neuromancer where he's talking, you know, the futuristic
cyber punk environment and talking about technology reaching the point

(01:14:37):
where humans can make their most magical ideas actually real,
such as making a pack with the demon, which becomes
possible in this book because it's you may end up
making a pack with an artificial intelligence. But we have
a case herey where was something that is seemingly magical,
the idea that that that one brain can speak to
another via some sort of an interface, be a magical

(01:15:00):
or technological. As the case ends up being, the only
way to achieve real magic is not through magic, yeah,
but through but through science, calling on the old, the
old slime mold itself. So there you have it. I
hope you enjoyed this, uh, this this journey, this uh,
this exploration into into history, into uh, into magic, into science.

(01:15:21):
We really covered a lot of bases here. About the
only thing we didn't do we didn't drag in a
lot of mythology or or theology, but we uh, we
hit on a number of topics here. This was a
weird one, but I had a lot of fun. So
so hopefully everyone out there feels the same. But hey,
let us know about it. In the meantime, you can
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
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(01:15:43):
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(01:16:16):
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