X-Message-Number: 19690 Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 13:52:08 +1000 From: Damien Broderick <> Subject: Bob Park sez cryonics is horseshit That feisty fellow Bob Park, gadfly of the American Physical Society, is caustic about cryonics and Charles Platt, inter alia, linking it with UFO loons: ========== http://www.aps.org/WN/ 2. BOOK REVIEW: "THE HUNT FOR ZERO POINT," by NICK COOK. If this book is about controlling gravity, what's with the "zero point"? The confusion is natural; both lie within the province of fringe scientists who haven't a clue of where the real world stops and the fantasy world of Atlantis and UFO's begins. Cook is not a scientist of any sort; in his world, these guys are the insiders. Don't look for them in the pages of Phys Rev; they're not a bunch of pointy-headed academics. They are part of the black world of really important top secret stuff like -- well, electrogravitics. So who exactly fed Nick Cook this enormous pile of horse manure? If you're a regular reader of WN, you've already met them all. 3. FRINGE: WHERE EVERYTHING IS SECRET, AND NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. When Cook set out on his search for "the biggest secret since the atom bomb," he went straight to the Integrity Research Institute, in Washington, DC, where you can buy books and videos with titles like "Holistic Physics and Consciousness" (WN 5 Mar 99). IRI is really Tom Valone, a former patent examiner who lost his job in the fallout from the Conference on Free Energy (WN 21 May 99). He had recruited Paul LaViolette, who claims the B-2 uses anti-gravity, reverse engineered from a crashed flying saucer. He was also fired (WN 18 Aug 00). They sent Cook to the Institute for Advanced Study. Not the one in Princeton; the one in Austin, TX. It consists of Harold Puthoff, who wants to extract energy from the zero point of the vacuum. He used to run the CIA's "remote viewing" program, which was inspired by "Mind Reach," a book he wrote with Russell Targ (WN 11 Mar 94). Finally, Cook sought advice from Charles Platt, founder of CryoCare, a company that keeps human heads bobbing in liquid nitrogen until scientists can figure out how to restart them (WN 21 Jul 00). Bob Park can be reached via email at ================== Damien Broderick Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19690