Is there such a thing as bad luck?

Positive attitudes help with interpersonal relationships. They don't cause any sort of response from the universe.

Err, a development of a good relationship is in itself also a response from the certain part of the "universe" (wherever you got that universe thing from). It's just a matter of how you look at it.

The mechanistic science still can't explain even such a simple thing like an emotion, so there is still a lot to discover in that area. And I, as a scientist, prefer to keep my mind open for new opportunities - while you seem to prefer the way of Inquisition.
 
There is no such thing as luck. Just different outcomes to events. Some of which have a higher value to the individual than others.
 
Whoever mentioned the universe - I specifically referred to basic things like gestures/mimics or on the other side electromagnetism which is easily measurable. It's easy to measure the human aura, as well as movements of energy in a human body - it's been done countless times already.
Yeah, this is just attempting to wrap ancient superstitions into more scientific language to give the ideas more credibility. They have no basis in science, and in fact are completely ruled out by what we know about science.

For instance, you made a statement about how sounds affect DNA. Given the chemistry of how DNA operates, while there may be some small effect, that effect will in no way be directed in any particular direction depending on the sort of sound: i.e. any effect it has will be completely random with respect to fitness. Furthermore, the effect of sound on DNA will be basically equivalent to any other method of adding energy to the cells, such as slightly raising the temperature.

There cannot be a specific, directed response such as DNA responding to a kind voice in a different way than an angry one.
 
Ohh, so YOU are the guy who knows all the truth about the universe? :LOL: And I was wondering when the messiah will appear...

Again - someone with your track record should not even be allowed to use the word "science" to begin with. It's an insult to any scientist out there.

Many of those ideas have a firm basis in science and no matter how hard you may wish the opposite, you're just talking uninformed bullshit.

You are probably not familiar with the phantom DNA effect either, which has been definitely proven multiple times. YOUR version of what you personally think science is supposed to be can't explain that stuff at all, but even such baboons are capable of measuring and seeing it. But then I guess you'd be inclined to call it magic or religion or whatever. Go join the book burning thread, seems like you could add some nice material to the topic.

Just in case you want to do some research on it (though I doubt it), here are some keywords to look for:

- DNA-Soliton light waves
- Fermi-Pasta-Ulam
- photon storage of biological systems
- Electomagnetic Bio-information

Books:
Fractal Structure in DNA Code and Human Language : Towards a Semiotics of Biogenetic Information by Garjajew
Poponin, Vladimir: The DNA Phantom Effect: Direct Measurement of A New Field in the Vacuum Substructure. Boulder Creek, Ca. 1995.
Coherent photon storage of biological systems by F. Popp
Pitkänen, Matti: Wormholes and possible new physics in biological length scales, Helsinki 1997
 
A polite request, lets not get too religious and metaphysical on this one otherwise I won't be able to post any longer when the thread is moved to the RPSC forum.. please!

@Chalnoth
But having a positive attitude doesn't actually change anything about the world around you... Positive attitudes help with interpersonal relationships. They don't cause any sort of response from the universe.

I never knew interpersonal relationships were not part of the Universe. ;)

Heck, even observing a quantum particle changes its state - surely that is causing a response from the Universe.

OK.. so you have a bad day and bad attitude and what happens is that you buy some chocolate on the way to a friends. In your bad mood and waiting for the whole Universe to apologise to you, you decide to throw the chocolate wrapper on the floor and lo and behold a policeman notices it and fines you. Who do you blame? Yourself or the stupid chocolate wrapper?
 
Heck, even observing a quantum particle changes its state - surely that is causing a response from the Universe.
Actually, it doesn't. This gets a bit into the details of quantum mechanics, but suffice it to say that if I set up an instrument to measure variable X, then it reports a specific measurement whether or not any person is around to look at the readout.

Basically, the measurement effect is just a representation of the fact that in order to make some measurement or other, you have to make use of some sort of interaction. For instance, in order for us to see an object, either photons must bounce off of that object or be emitted from it before those photons reach our eyes. While the effect of an individual photon bouncing off an object may be small, and of a single photon emission similarly so, those effects can make for significant differences (and their effect is identical whether or not somebody later has their eye in the way of the photon).

I belabor this point because there is a truly disturbing amount of quantum woo out there. The "What the Bleep" movies were especially horrifying in their depiction of the science.

In the end, quantum mechanics most certainly is very strange, but it really doesn't change anything about how we understand the macroscopic world in which we live: it only has significant effects at very low temperatures and very small sizes, both of which are far outside the range of our typical experience. When you start applying quantum mechanics to things more inside our usual experience, you find that it predicts the exact sort of normal occurrences we have become familiar with. And it certainly had better, when you think about it: if it didn't, quantum mechanics would have been demonstrated false a long time ago.
 
Poponin, Vladimir: The DNA Phantom Effect: Direct Measurement of A New Field in the Vacuum Substructure. Boulder Creek, Ca. 1995.

This text can be found at: http://www.rialian.com/rnboyd/dna-phantom.htm. From there, we can find that
When the DNA is removed from the scattering chamber, one anticipates that the autocorrelation function will be the same as before the DNA was placed in the scattering chamber. Surprisingly and counter-intuitively it turns out that the autocorrelation function measured just after the removal of the DNA from the scattering chamber looks distinctly different from the one obtained before the DNA was placed in the chamber. Two examples of the autocorrelation functions measured just after the removal of the physical DNA are shown in Figures 2c and d. After duplicating this many times and checking the equipment in every conceivable way, we were forced to accept the working hypothesis that some new field structure is being excited from the physical vacuum. We termed this the DNA phantom in order to emphasize that its origin is related with the physical DNA. We have not yet observed this effect with other substances in the chamber.
Which makes me wonder which other substances they tried - whisky? toothpaste? formalin?
Let's continue:
After the discovery of this effect we began a more rigorous and continuous study of this phenomena. We have found that, as long as the space in the scattering chamber is not disturbed, we are able to measure this effect for long periods of time. In several cases we have observed it for up to a month. It is important to emphasize that two conditions are necessary in order to observe the DNA phantoms. The first is the presence of the DNA molecule and the second is the exposure of the DNA to weak coherent laser radiation. This last condition has been shown to work with two different frequencies of laser radiation.
The obvious question is of course: How do we know that this is a real effect and that the scattering chamber is not simply contaminated with DNA decomposition products?
 
OK.. so you have a bad day and bad attitude and what happens is that you buy some chocolate on the way to a friends. In your bad mood and waiting for the whole Universe to apologise to you, you decide to throw the chocolate wrapper on the floor and lo and behold a policeman notices it and fines you. Who do you blame? Yourself or the stupid chocolate wrapper?

Yes, but a positive attitude while good to have isn't going to do anything to prevent the drunken driver from sideswiping you and possibly snuffing out your life.

It won't stop an airplane from crashing if you just happen to be on it.

It does nothing to stop a Tsunami from hitting the beach resort you just happen to be at.

Any of which can be considered bad luck.

Yada yada yada. That's our point.

The world we live in doesn't give a rats arse whether you have a good attitude or a bad attitude. People do obviously. But I've seen people mugged purely for having a good attitude, so even that isn't going to in any way guarantee "good things." A co-worker of mine in Japan used to like finding guys that looked happy and then picking a fight with them and beating the crap out of them.

Regards,
SB
 
The world we live in doesn't give a rats arse whether you have a good attitude or a bad attitude. People do obviously. But I've seen people mugged purely for having a good attitude, so even that isn't going to in any way guarantee "good things." A co-worker of mine in Japan used to like finding guys that looked happy and then picking a fight with them and beating the crap out of them.

Regards,
SB

And I like beating the crap out of people with bad attitudes...your point?:LOL:

Exceptions don't disprove the rule.

Unless you live in a world with no people, a positive attitude CAN and WILL increase your chances of getting positive feedback. Whether or not luck actually exists is irrelevent.
 
And I like beating the crap out of people with bad attitudes...your point?:LOL:

Exceptions don't disprove the rule.

Unless you live in a world with no people, a positive attitude CAN and WILL increase your chances of getting positive feedback. Whether or not luck actually exists is irrelevent.

You'll notice that I said "People do obviously." give a rats ass whether you have a good attitude or not.

You'll also notice I said "doesn't guarantee" as in a positive attitude does NOT equal 100% things good will happen when intereracting with other people. In other words, no matter how much you try to make sure your interaction with other people will be positive, there is no way to guarantee that it will be a positive experience every single time.

What if you have a great attitude, go in for a job interview, and the interviewer had just caught his wife in bed with a guy. He may try to remain objective, he may not.

Going into a restaurant with a positive attitude and big smile won't guarantee great service, the other person might be having a bad day or just a bad attidude in general.

What's so hard to understand about the concept that there are no Guarantee's.

I'll rephrase your statement.

Unless you live in a world with no people, a positive attitude will GENERALLY increase your chances of getting positive feedback.

There I even used all caps like you did to emphasize the important parts. ;)

Unless you have a way of brainwashing and controlling other people, your attitude is only half of the equation. Making sure your half of it is as good as it can possibly be will certainly increase your chances of getting a desirable response if they also are receptable to it, but it in no way guarantee's that it will increase your chances.

Regards,
SB
 
Larry Niven's Ringworld has some interesting ideas about luck in it (among other interesting ideas). Read it. It is good. The book that is.
 
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Larry Niven's Ringworld has some interesting ideas about luck in it (among other interesting ideas). Read it. It is good.
It did make for a very entertaining plot device, but yeah, that idea is a fundamental impossibility.
 
The obvious question is of course: How do we know that this is a real effect and that the scattering chamber is not simply contaminated with DNA decomposition products?

Well how do you know anything at all? Either you'll experiment and find out for yourself, or you'll search for info, people etc. and try to prove if it has any merrit.

The modern science can't yet explain such basic things like magnetism or gravity or how electricity works, but you never doubted those ideas either. Why? Do you think we should not continue research into those and the "final truth" is settled?

Another totally off the bat question, do you think vacuum is empty and static? The "regular" science says so, while the quantum theory speaks of zero-point energy etc. Which is right, which is wrong? Or are they both wrong or both valid or depending on the situation and the problem observed?

Obviously the workings of DNA will take quite a while to get resolved, but you surely won't believe that a couple of thousands alkali pairs are all the info it takes to contain our whole genetic "blueprint" and all the programming that gets obvious throughout our lives? Surely it's highly unlikely that DNA is just there for protein production (according to more recent research, it's only a tiny part of DNA that does that). So it's all still a huge mistery.

As of right now, our science can't even tell what makes the heart tick or how an emotion works, let alone having the authority to blindly deny such novel new theories with the non-argument "we don't get it, so it's nonsense science" or the good old "it defies the (classical) laws of physics" which are already defied in many areas like the aforementioned quantum theory.

I never had anything to do with this sort of research and don't claim that it's "100% true" or whatever. I'm just open for new possibilities and whatever we can learn from this, it's great that we can learn something new as such. Even if that turns out being the knowledge that this or that does not work as assumed.

I read of one theory that intrigued me, based on some old ideas by Tesla and Moray. From my shaky memory, it says something like that the electrons don't do a 360° rotation around the nuclei, but 2x360° - once in real and once in complex (in math terms) space. The energy they absorb in complex space can be released in the real space as EM-radiation when you create a certain sort of dipole. That was supposedly Tesla's idea for getting free energy, which is supposedly also how the infamous "Moray generator" should work - by harnessing that energy via a apparatus which spposedly can convert that to regular EM-energy.

Then you look back and see that until less than 100 years ago, aether was a valid concept in science until certain groups declared it as impossible (just so, of course). Could it be that the vacuum is actually not empty and stale but full of oscillating cosmic energy, or zero-point energy? Or a chaos of energy vortices in the complex space ("4th dimension") interacting with our space via yet undiscoverd means? I don't know, but I'm not inclined to blindly deny it, based on many observable occurances which can't be explained in terms of regular science. The problem explained: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000398/00/cosconstant.pdf

And although I neither have the knowledge nor the means to check this, it surely sounds interesting and I am open for the possibility that there might be something we could get out of it, be it wrong or right. I'd never dare saying "I'm an expert (electronics engineer) and according to all the science I know, this can't be possible" - in my book that would disqualify me totally. One must also be capable to accept that maybe, just maybe, your thinking was wrong or incomplete and whatever new idea might be better. The good old ego pains (and in case of current science, funding is a big factor too as witnessed with AGW-church-of-doom).
 
You're hilarious, _xxx_. To those of us with real science educations, that stuff is fucking hilarious. Just to put it simply, the mere fact that we don't know everything does not imply that we know nothing. And when somebody uses obviously poor experimental procedures to propose something that is basically impossible based upon what we do know, well, that's what pseudoscience is all about.

Oh, and my favorite part of that paper? The end:

Dr. Poponin is a quantum physicist who is recognized world wide as a leading expert in quantum biology, including the nonlinear dynamics of DNA and the interactions of weak electromagnetic fields with biological systems. He is the Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Biochemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is currently working with the Institute of HeartMath in a collaborative research project between IHM and the RAS. He can be contacted at Institute of HeartMath, Research Division, 14700 West Park Ave. Boulder Creek, CA 95006. Phone 408-338-8700, Fax 408-338-1182.
Only cranks feel the need to do this with their papers. And the Institute of HeartMath? Yeah, that's a nice fun woo-peddling website, selling a variety of items with no medical merit whatsoever.
 
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