ASM059 Healing Frequencies, Photonic Propulsion, and the Favor of God

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healing frequencies photonic propulsion and the favor of god all that and more on this week's episode of ask science

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this week tickets go on sale for the liturgists gathering in dallas there's only 500 seats tickets are affordable and we'd love to see you there go to the liturgist.com to learn more but for now let's answer some science faith and life questions and get it started [Music] hey science mike i hope you're doing well i have some questions for you that stem from some occurrences that i had last night so last night for me was a series of coincidence upon coincidence that essentially led me to meet a girl and then four hours later get to have some really deep connection vulnerable conversation with her that neither of us were looking for at all we both joked around saying that the universe wanted us to be friends because it was just so profoundly coincidental so i noticed that when i you know came back to my more normal regular life and started telling my closest friends about it there were two schools of thought about why last night had happened and they both sounded kind of similar both of them i could say could be summed up in the phrase things really seem to line up well for people who are christians i had air quotes around that but you couldn't see them the first perspective on that is actually the one that my fiance and i have and we talked about last night both of us said you know what things really line up well for christians because those same connections could have happened for anybody but because i found purpose and faith i'm able to find purpose anywhere and that carries over into when i randomly meet a 17 year old girl at a bar you know it works out whereas the second school of thought that some of my other closest friends had had was things really seem to line up well for christians as in god hand put me there for a purpose and so i should pray about how to proceed and be really intentional about the future and i just keep on thinking on that on that difference how both perspectives really do give hope and they really validate the idea of intentionality and finding purpose in in something but they feel so different to me and the second school of thought quite frankly is one that i feel more and more these days separating me from my friends because the specificity of it feels limiting to who god is whereas you know the school of thought that i'm more comfortable with is that i can go anywhere and find purpose there even if it's not where god hand put me quote unquote i could find purpose there what my question is is that i'm wondering how those two different thought processes affect your brain how those two different approaches to faith affect the way that you empathize with others or view yourself or give your time or money or what have you i can't wait to hear what you think about this and i'm really appreciative of everything that you do thank you so much science mike and i hope i can talk to you again soon goodbye okay there's a lot there that's quite a question let's start with the end let's start with the end then we'll go back and maybe talk about some of the stuff in the beginning these two approaches one in which you are open you are open to good things happening in your life you're an intentional you are aware as a response to god uh i think this approach is really well typified by um elizabeth gilbert's story in eat pray love where she kept asking god for a sign a sign that things would be different in her life and when she walked out onto a new york street there was a parade of elephants which she knew immediately were her elephants her sign but those elephants would have been there anyway but because she was looking for them they became her elephants that's one approach there's the other approach where you are asking god for specific guidance and direction researchers have studied them both i'd direct you to andrew newberg's how god changes your brain for the first approach and i would direct you to tonya lerman's when god talks back understanding evangelical america's relationship with religion something like that as the subtitle uh for the second approach they are distinct one is a matter of mental posture effectively positive thinking that has been shown to produce positive results in people's lives now this isn't because we're tuning into some energy of the universe at least not in the science basically when you believe good things can happen when you believe that there is hope when you are open to dare i say blessings in your life your behavior changes you're more likely to take risks you're more likely to process things that happen in response to your actions as rewards as opposed to penalties and over time you're increasing your statistical likelihood that good things will happen in your life that's that approach that is very much how my faith is structured an openness to the good gift of life and i have found i've had multiple i know exactly what you're talking about you know you meet someone it seems ordained it seems magical i have several of those stories i have friends i didn't have before uh you know i count rob bell as a very close friend and meeting rob and connecting with rob felt like that felt kind of magical michael gunger's another example when he and i met in denver and talked about doubt and faith i felt like i'd met someone and then last year at sundance i met jacob and haigen marshall who if you listen to the liturgist podcast they were on the last episode it felt magical i've got a group of friends that i met in laguna and we meet around the country and whenever we get together we just connect with each other on a profound and deep level and in moments like that god seems very close god seems very present and science neuroscience would describe that as a cognitive posture a cognitive posture openness and hopefulness the second approach where you're praying for something prescriptive or you're asking god for specific things is different effectively people who do that who feel god guiding their actions in specific ways which honestly i do that sometimes too scientists understand that is probably something in evangelical and charismatic church cultures a set of practices that train people to count parts of their mental activity is beyond their consciousness that's not the most accessible sentence i've ever said you basically train yourself to experience parts of your mental function as coming from beyond yourself so the fact that i can often today still even in my very weird deconstructed place feel god's hand guiding me is probably just a lifetime of practicing evangelical prayer now both of these can be beneficial and both of these can be detrimental both of these can be beneficial and both can be detrimental i've just got done writing my book and i do a whole chapter on prayer and the science of prayer and the effects of prayer and one thing i really dove into was people whose faith has been broken by prayer because they asked god for things good things necessary things needed things that did not happen they believed they'd had positive prayer experiences in the past but for whatever reason the sick person didn't get better for whatever reason things didn't line up and when that happens people's faith can be shaken so as much as these two strategies one a posture of openness and hopefulness is helpful and the other that learning to process your mental sensations in a different way to experience intercessory repair can be helpful they can be detrimental if we become resolute or absolute in our approach to prayer in our approach to how god might move in our lives because things line up well for christians they really do but they also line up horribly based on social context you know if you're a white evangelical straight christian who grew up in an affluent home sure life totally seems to line up well because you have an amazing socio-economic context with a lot of wind at your back but the further you drift from that in the west the more it might not seem like things line up so well for you even though you're a christian so sometimes things are terrible for christians and the same is true things seem to line up well for atheists but also terribly or for buddhists or muslims or whatever i'm very reticent to associate the blessing of god whatever that means with a particular faith walk or journey but when i step back to the science what i can say confidently in the sciences is that type of positive thinking that type of openness can be beneficial it has been shown in scientific studies to alter people's behavior enough to over time alter their situational outcomes so pretty pretty sciencey answer there but that's where i have to go with prayer to you know give you the best that i've got so i'll have links to both how god changes your brain and when god talks back in the show notes on ask sciencemike.com you'll probably notice uh frequent listeners that i recommend how god changes your brain about every third episode because it's my favorite book in the world so if you haven't read it yet i highly recommend it it's super pragmatic it'll teach you a lot about practical ways to nurture god in your brain but it will also give you a very a plain english understanding of neuroscience and even my favorite field of all sciences neuro theology i also am a big fan of tanya lerman's work especially when god talks back it's a great book and it's a little longer a little more academic but but well worth the effort if you'd like to understand more about how prayer changes people's thinking and actions [Music] [Applause] via email paul asks could we really travel to mars in three days using photonic propulsion and then he has a link to an article which links to the daily mail which i will have on asksciencemike.com if you'd like to read the article the first thing i will say be very skeptical of anything you read about science and the daily mail in my experience it's got to be one of the worst science reporting operations in modern journalism very frequently overstate scientific claims or misrepresent scientific claims and in this article it's a great example it does talk about photonic propulsion which is a real thing and then it talks about the em drive which has been widely refuted by scientists online and any remaining trials no data has been supporting that device's function so just watch out for the daily mail but let's talk a little bit about space travel so that we can understand the context of this article it's really hard to go anywhere in space as we know frequent listeners of the show especially know einstein showed us that gravity curves space time so anytime you get matter somewhere you get mass somewhere it bends space time that creates a gravity well the earth has a gravity well and it accelerates objects towards its center with a force of 9.8 meters per second squared okay so if there was no atmosphere and you let go of a bowling ball or a ball bearing or an elephant or whatever above the earth's surface it would move towards earth's surface gaining 9.8 meters per second velocity every second that's why the meters per second squared okay and that's a problem if you want to leave the earth gravity well it means you have to accelerate in the other direction more than 9.8 meters per second to break even so the way we do this is with rockets with propulsion chemical propulsion where we're using exhaust to create thrust now airplanes don't do that airplanes use aerodynamics but airplanes only work in the atmosphere so we use rockets to leave the atmosphere because propellant the energy leaving a craft through its exhaust creates thrust even without an atmosphere are you with me this is a little esoteric of stuff it's really basic if you've ever you know held a can of silly string or sprayed a bottle of champagne or anything you felt this this phenomenon where exhaust creates thrust and and it's a huge problem because it means you have to carry the fuel to create the exhaust and that fuel has weight so the more fuel you have the more fuel you need to carry the weight of the fuel to make this make sense imagine that you're going to drive from maine to california but there were no gas stations on the way and you had to carry all your gas so you'd have to start rigging up trailers to your car carrying this fuel which would add weight which would mean what that you need more fuel so when we want to go somewhere in space we've got to carry all this fuel and that's problem one problem two is let's say you wanna go to mars you've gotta accelerate towards mars fast enough to escape earth's gravity well but when you get to mars you have to slow down enough to get captured in mars's gravity well so you have to carry that fuel as well if you want to come back you've got enough fuel to leave mars's gravity well again and then slow down enough to get captured into the earth's gravity well if you don't slow down at the end of your voyage you'll just fly right past your destination planet without going into orbit around it and then you'll just drift through space forever until you hit something okay so it's a terrible plan so scientists are looking for other ways to accelerate spacecraft and there's something that we've been working on for a while called a solar sail where you actually let the photons and energized particles coming from the sun strike a very thin membrane and in doing so transfer a little bit of momentum to a spacecraft and then without using any fuel you can accelerate so we're in the very early trials of solar sails well some scientists have thought that's a plausible idea in physics why can't we make our own energized photon stream like with lasers and accelerate spacecraft this is totally plausible in physics but you would need a lot of energy you would probably need these lasers in orbit because otherwise you'd be heating the atmosphere and dealing with atmospheric turbulence and if you're putting lasers in space where are you getting the power to operate those lasers and how are you keeping them fixed on the craft as it traveled there's a lot of unsolved engineering problems here and we don't know how good a solution it would be that's why nasa is in very early theoretical work with photonic propulsion and here's a big one let's say you used laser light high-powered lasers and solar sails to accelerate at a high speed towards mars you've got to slow down to stop at mars so you've either got to have like a laser station on mars to counteract and help you decelerate or you've got to carry conventional rocket fuel which means the craft got heavier and there's a lot of unsolved problems here long story short eventually something like this may be a way that humanity travels great distances in space it may be it is nowhere near practical application today right now we're definitely in a chemical rocket era and i'd love to see scientists do more with that but you know what what concerns me about journalism like what we're seeing here in the daily mail is they're taking a pretty esoteric unexplored idea the physics are pretty solid the engineering may or may not be remotely feasible with our technology today or tomorrow and they're kind of passing it around as hey guess what soon we'll go to mars in three days which that's relativistic speeds it's very difficult for us to take something the size of a spacecraft and get it up to any significant fraction of light speed even using light so yes in response to your question theoretically sure if you had a powerful enough laser and a well-designed sail you could accelerate a spacecraft to mars in three days i have no idea though how you would slow it down enough to actually visit mars just you would fly right past mars and i haven't done the math but i'm suspecting that would be well well beyond the escape velocity for our solar system in fact i don't have to use the math voyagers above that and voyager couldn't do mars in three days or anywhere near it you would just fly right out of the solar system that might be the escape velocity for the milky way you might leave the galaxy not very complete journalism anyway if you'd like to know more about solar sails and other future spacecraft technologies i'll have a link in the show notes again on asksciencemike.com [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hello friend i was wondering if you could talk about the idea of 432 hertz being a healing frequency while it sounds mostly like crazy talk to me a lot of people seem really convinced that this frequency as well as a few others are in tune with the vibrations of the universe and even use quotes from einstein and tesla talking about energy vibrations as support for their claims while i think i know your answer already you probably do i was hoping you could tell me how good the science is behind this or if there is any science at all it would be great to hear from you my curiosity can overwhelm me from time to time thanks well your curiosity is good i encourage it curiosity is my favorite feature of human beings it might be a tie between our curiosity and our compassion but your skepticism about this idea is extremely well placed let's talk about vibrations for a second a hertz is one cycle per second of a wave that's all a hertz is so 432 hertz would be 432 cycles per second any music 440 hertz today is recognized as an a note in a scale 440 vibrations per second of the atmosphere of compression waves we call sound that's how you make an a so some people are saying that 432 hertz should be the a because it's resonant with the universe and i've heard this before but i wanted to see if there was absolutely any scientific claims at all the first thing i would point out like i get a lot of questions on the show about how do we know what's good science versus junk science when people try to justify an idea using quotes from famous scientists instead of the work of famous scientists that's a warning [Laughter] so if you're trying to understand you know why big bang cosmology or inflationary cosmology is compelling a scientist won't use quotes to convince you of that they'll explain the model to you they'll explain the mathematics behind it they'll explain what it predicts and will explain how those predictions compare to our observations in reality those are the criteria for good science and i went to several websites uh more than i ever have on this topic to look at the arguments for 432 hertz tuning being a healing frequency they say it's because 432 is uh resonates or i guess is divisible with is a multiple of eight hertz and they say that eight hertz is both the frequency of our two halves our brain synchronizing interesting and also of our dna replicating no citation included uh they also say that eight hertz is important because of schumann resonance now schumann resonance is a real scientific idea uh that has to do with how waves have resonance between the ionosphere and the surface of the earth but they don't actually there's equal eight hertz there's a peak at seven hertz and change uh and peaks in other areas in human radiation but human radiation is not some harmonic coordinated phenomenon at all there's these peaks that i think if we played them as notes they would sound terrible anyway so they're saying this resonates these are the signs of pseudoscience they take a bunch of unrelated ideas they use ambiguous terms they don't mention things specifically they don't cite any studies they just use a lot of words that sound fancy sound important some of these sites even say that the 440 hertz a is the work of nazis trying to hold humanity back that this is pseudoscience in its purest form absolutely its purest form you know i've talked about other things on the show like essential oils which are you know basically harmless maybe even have some benefits essential oils are going to moisturize your skin they smell good they make you feel good and i take a pretty laid back approach to that stuff this 432 hertz tuning creating healing it's hogwash it's not a good thing to believe it's i wouldn't go so far as to say it's benign because convincing people that using 430 hertz tuning is going to help alleviate medical issues it's dangerous it's unethical it's not based on science at all again that this is a perfect example of pseudoscience versus good science how could i be convinced i would need to see studies with trials using music tuned this way showing effects on outcome i would need to see a model a predictive model with specificity about why 432 hertz makes changes in the environment is resonant with the universe whatever that means i need that explained in more detail i need more information on how that's relevant to human biology other than vague notions of resonance that's science versus pseudoscience and that's why i'm science mike and not pseudoscience mike hey mike um i i have a two-part question for you the first question that i have is is about a friend of mine who's currently dying of lung cancer he's a teenager and he doesn't have very long to live at this point just a matter of days and this has really brought up a lot of existential questions for me and but my question for you is what specifically is happening in his lungs like how can you get cancer and how can that get to a point to where it kills somebody like i've heard that everybody has cancer in their bodies but it doesn't metastasize in everybody or something like that can you kind of break that down like what's why do some people get cancer and some don't and then how how does that end up killing somebody and then the second question is about prayer and you know i know on the i think it was liturgist podcast you were talking about how prayer can be good for you for your brain health but as far as like affecting the world around you it seemed like you didn't find a lot of great evidence that it changes the world around you and uh and i've been doing some studying in quantum mechanics and it seems like they're on the the quantum level that things can be changed by prayer or by you affecting the world around you based upon what you believe about the world and that kind of thing so the quantum zeno effect seems to say that as you observe something it ceases to decay on the quantum level and the delayed choice quantum eraser that you can change or alter and experiments results after the experiment is is done based upon what you believe about the experiment so basically you can change the results after the fact based upon what you believe about the world and then bell's theorem obviously that you can change things around the world that distance doesn't really become an issue on the quantum level so um maybe i don't have a good understanding of all that um and i was just hoping that you could do a great job of explaining that what does any of that mean to cancer to prayer to our daily life and yeah that's my question thanks first i am sorry to hear about what's happening with your friend cancer is awful we can talk about the biological aspects of cancer and maybe those insights will help you find some peace so i'm happy to share them but i don't want to minimize the fact that these are some of the hardest questions we face as people as believers where is god in this where is god in a teenager with lung cancer and i am sorry for what you're going through in terms of cancer i had a researcher explain it to me this way cells are supposed to make new cells and when you're injured for example imagine you cut your arm your cells are supposed to make more cells even more rapidly in order to heal so your cells have little switches in their dna some switches say divide faster make more cells more rapidly and others say stop doing that so you can imagine that let's imagine in the scene of a cell you have four accelerators and two breaks well this researcher told me that in order for you to get cancer one of your accelerators has to get stuck and both of your breaks has to get lost so these are these happen through genetic mutations now you can be born with genetic mutations that's why some people are more predisposed to certain types of cancers because they have a hereditary genetic mutation where they're either missing a break or they have an accelerator at birth that's stuck open and then there's things we do and things that happen in our environment that can cause genetic mutations smoking is a well-known carcinogen other carcinogens are chemicals that as they interact with the body as they you know have decay or whatever are known to cause genetic damage and so every time that happens you're playing a statistics game some of your dna gets damaged and if enough of your dna gets damaged where you have these cellular growth genes switched on without the breaks stopping it now you have a cancer that's the cause of all cancers now there's different genes involved different tissues but the same basic idea is responsible for all cancers a natural normal process of cell division goes haywire now why is that a big deal because of tumors tumors grow in the body they swell and they take up the space that your healthy tissues are supposed to occupy you get the wrong kind of tissue in the wrong spot this is obviously a big deal in something like your lungs if you start losing your air sacs to tumors if tumors take up that space you can't breathe anymore and if those tumors shed if they metastasize like we talk about and they create tumors in different parts of the body they can interfere with functions there your lung cancer can start to grow in your bones and doctors would still call it lung cancer but now it's interfering with your bone marrow that's why cancer is so dangerous it's why it's so painful we are making amazing strides in cancer research identifying these genetic triggers for different types of cancer and using different therapies to address these mechanisms on the level of dna as we can do that potentially you could see an end to chemotherapies and into radiation these really invasive ways of dealing with tumors that's why funding cancer research is so important why even private people making donations to cancer research does make a difference because the more scientists can map out the genetic mechanisms for cancer and the more they can research delivery mechanisms to mitigate those genetic effects the less cancer we will have in the world that also means there is no one cure for cancer since every cancer relies on a different combination of genetic accelerants and genetic breaks you've got to have a gene therapy or or some technique to deal with them on an individual basis that's cancer what about prayer my dad had a stroke last year and as my mom and i drove down from tallahassee to orlando where he was we prayed and we asked other people to pray and if you follow my work you know i have logical objections to the idea that god intercedes in prayer because if god for example could heal my father that god can take that action in the world but takes no action for someone else in more grave circumstances or societies more affected by suffering or violence or natural disaster how is god good how is god loving it's a you know this question comes up constantly on the show the problem of evil and intercessory prayer uh brings up the problem of evil in a serious way and yet i pray and i pray because what else am i going to do you know prayer changes me prayer makes me a more loving person a more patient person prayer aligns me with god prayer makes me more like who i understand god to be but i still pray in an intercessory way i still ask god about specific situations in life and unfortunately i don't do that for any scientific reason quantum dynamics is no way out here the things you referenced for example the way that uh quantum particles are wave functions they collapse when they interact with other particles but before that thanks to heisenberg's uncertainty principle we can't specifically know too much about a particle and it appears not only do we not know much about a particle that particles really exist in this fuzzy wave function form based on what we see in experiments that doesn't mean our consciousness affects reality it means observation affects reality and observation is nothing but a particle interaction we observe using particles force carriers or actual physical particles that's how observations happen and the non-locality of bell's theorem uh again that has to do with subatomic actions one of the greatest critiques or frustrations scientists have with people of faith especially progressive people of faith is the degree to which we use quantum dynamics to create some spooky action that leaves an opening for god and although the quantum description of reality is truly and genuinely counter-intuitive and mystical it doesn't denote these kinds of generalizations people make that our our experience our cautions our beliefs whatever shape reality it's just not there i would point you to brian green's the fabric of the cosmos if you'd like to learn more about that but we still pray and we still find comfort in it and most people most americans even today believe that prayer works and i'm one of them i can't explain that to you it has no scientific basis it has logical problems but sometimes when i can't do anything else i pray and sometimes things turn out okay and sometimes when i can't do anything else i pray and sometimes things turn out bad in both of those situations i think how can i be a source of healing and peace in this world and other times like recently when my own grandfather passed away i simply take the time to lament and recognize that part of life is suffering and that there's no shortcut through it there's no magic trick and indeed there's no science that can get me out of that suffering my only choice is to be present with it to move through it and understand that even that represents a gift the gift to be alive and aware and conscious the gift of walking on the earth while carrying the very image of god one of the most profound things to me about the christian faith is it represents a god who like us suffers to [Music] well that's another episode of ask science mike in the books thank you for keeping the show going if you've sent in a question before thank you you've made this show possible if you've rated this show on itunes thank you you've made the show possible if you've donated money on patreon thank you you've made this show possible if you've shared ask science mike with someone thank you you've made the show possible if you've never done any of those things give it a shot see what it did there not only was that a genuine thank you it's also a little bit of marketing this is your show if these conversations matter to you open honest conversations about science faith life doubt uh taboo topics all these things you're the ones who make it happen go to patreon find asklancemic or go to asksciencemike.com click the patreon button a dollar a month is great five dollars a month is phenomenal and makes the show possible rate us on itunes it's how new people find the show same thing with social media sharing and we need your questions you can use the hashtag asksciencemike or you can go to asksciencemike.com where you can email me a question or record a voice question i can play on the show lots of events coming up this week tickets go on sale for the dallas event of the liturgist gathering this is an affordable much more affordable conference experience than we've had before it's a larger 500 people that should be small enough to still be intimate but large enough that you can make some lasting friendships oh it's going to be great we're going to music some pretty amazing stuff like we don't belong with michael and lisa gunger and a string quartet that's beautiful mind-blowing discussion topics lead talks and who knows we may even have a few friends stop by that you've heard on the show or that have contributed to our liturgical releases the liturgist gathering is going to be amazing and i'd love to see you there just go to the liturgist.com gathering to learn more also i'm on tour with gunger so if you'd like to see me in a radically different event than the liturgist gathering basically a gunger show with a couple of science mic uh segments and then a q a afterwards we'd love to see you and i've got tons of events just science mic events all over the country coming up so those can be found if you go to ask sciencemike.com and click on the events button and you can see if i'm coming near you and if i'm not coming near you and you'd like me to just go to ask sciencemic.com and click the book mic button there's several options to get me to your church or college or conference or community and i'd love to come so you can host an ass science mic live if you're in a city where i have enough listeners that that might be feasible or you can just book me to come give a talk and it's my favorite thing i love doing the podcast but i love meeting people in person way way more than than doing the show that's that's the real value of this for me is coming and meeting you and hearing about you and talking face to face so if you're interested ask sciencemike.com i want to thank andrew golucky for his pre-production work greg nordine as always for his production and sound design and jeb bottaford for the ask science mic theme song just this week i had another person sing it to me in the airport oh man i don't know how that became a thing but i love it thanks for listening the next few episodes may sound different i'm probably recording like in a tour van or hotel rooms not sure how that's going to work so if it sounds a little different you know why but we'll see next week how it goes [Music]