Does this video seem full of new age bunk?

[GordonDeeds]

I saw this video called THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take? This video seems like a bunch of bunk. I do like to study reasoning and specifically logical fallacies. And near the beginning of the video, one person in the video seems to be looking for the way a torus takes form anywhere he can find it (eg: cross section of apple, orange, magnetic field of the earth). He also mentioned the magnetic field around humans, which I'm not so sure has been proven scientifically. This seems (I specifically used the word "seems") like some form of confirmation bias. The tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. Like he was intentionally looking for the pattern of all objects taking form of a torus. Now I know that finding patterns can be vital to science (like yielding the same result over and over from a test), but in some cases it's just seeing things that aren't there. This guy says "It's the form that energy takes at every scale of existence." He said at EVERY level. From what I can see, shooting water out of a water gun does not yield, at least to the naked eye, a torus. Wouldn't that mean that it's not at EVERY level? Wouldn't that mean that we would see nothing but toruses (spelling?) if it was at EVERY level? I'm sure he'll find a way to trace it back to a torus. But he said EVERY level. I wish I knew more about the universe and the cosmos like Sagan, Tyson, Susskind, and all them, but that statement sounds like the Six Degrees of Bacon. No matter what you say, he'll trace it back to a torus even if it is a stretch. Like being able to trace every movie back to Kevin Bacon by no more than six degrees of separation.

This video seems like something that could have a scientifically sound hypothesis mixed into a bunch of new age balderdash.

My ultimate question after all that input... is this video just a bunch of new age science bunk?

Here's the link to the video.
Just type in "THRIVE: What On Earth Will It Take?" in YouTube if you want to see it. I'm new so I can't post links.

A scientific explanation for or against anything in specific point in the video would be appreciated. Not required. Only if you feel up to it. Or not if you don't feel up to it... I'm rambling.

 

[Brian-M]

Here's the video...

I hope you'll forgive me if I don't immediately spend the next two hours watching it.

And near the beginning of the video, one person in the video seems to be looking for the way a torus takes form anywhere he can find it (eg: cross section of apple, orange, magnetic field of the earth).

Cross-sections are two-dimensional. A torus is three-dimensional. Therefore, the cross-section of an apple or orange cannot be a torus.

And if you wanted an ubiquitous shape, a sphere is more common-place than a torus.

This guy says "It's the form that energy takes at every scale of existence." He said at EVERY level.

I wonder where he finds a torus shape in the chemical energy of a car battery, or the kinetic energy of an asteroid heading towards the earth. or even the thermal energy of a pool of molten lead?

This video seems like something that could have a scientifically sound hypothesis mixed into a bunch of new age balderdash.

I'll reserve my judgment of the video containing any scientifically sound hypotheses until after I've seen it. (If I bother.)

 

[Stray Cat]

Previous (short) thread about this video: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=228435

 

[Brian-M]

I started watching it. Here are the notes I made while watching it:

Lots and lots of fancy computer-generated graphics and uplifitng music. Very little substance.

[0:00:02] Caption: All facts in this movie have been independently confirmed. Sources are documented at thrivemovement.com

3D animation of lots of toruses arranged to make larger toruses, arranged to make larger toruses, merge to red blood cells, bacteria, fish, lizards, nature, etc.

Nonsense about the universe and life being meant to be in perfect balance. Happy people all around the world.

He says that we are meant to "thrive", but lots of people around the world are not thriving. But he's found a code in nature, art, etc.


[0:08:10] As a kid had a "direct experience of universal energy"; "had a vision of a whirpool pattern" and "just knew that the flow of the energy" was the "same in an atom as in our entire solar system" and that he too was "somehow made of that same pattern". Which is why he got into science, to discover how "humans fit into the over-all pattern of life energy".

[0:08:55] Years later he learned that the pattern he saw is known by some in the scientific world. "It turns out that in 1921 Albert Einstein got a nobel prize for discovering that when energy is released in the universe, there are little packets of wholeness that emerge. This pattern actually tells us a lot about how life evolved." (Graphics titled "Photoelectric Effect" depicting lots of little toruses.)

[0:09:35] "Each of these little packets of wholeness that Einstein discovered, called a quantum, is made out of it's surroundings but is distinct within it. Like a whirpool in water. These packets are always the same pattern, no matter what size, and they are surprizingly relevant to issues as seemingly disconnected as the wars in the Middle East, the global financial collapse, and how to acheive justice for everyone. We're about to explore how. Mathematicians call this pattern a torus. Energy in a torus enters in one end, circulates around the center, and exits out the other side. It's balanced, self-regulating, and always whole."

[0:10:30] Some blather about the torus being the basis for life and all self-regulating systems. "The universe is a torus-growing factory." (The images of galaxies they show look more like spirals than toruses to me. Showing it inside a computer-generated torus doesn't change that. The cycles they show in the weather or circulation on the sun they show are clearly not toruses, but they don't seem to care. Irregular oval pattern? Let's pretend it's a torus. Hell, even the whirpool pattern they started with isn't a torus.)

[0:13:33] "We're travelling in this boundless sea of infinite torus flow."

[0:13:45] "The torus is like the breath of the universe, the form that the flow of energy takes at every level of existance. But there's also an underlying structure in how the flow fits together, sort-of like a skeleton. It's called the vector equilibrium, a term coined by one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers, Buckminster Fuller (Architect, Inventor)"

He was so excited that he spent decades studying this.

He then starts talking about inventors using the torus to genereate energy without combustion. Zero-point energy, free energy.

At this point I stopped watching. No need listing to another 1 hour and 57 minutes of this gibberish to realize that it's total nonsense from start to finish. (Actually, there's no need to watch past the mangled Einstein reference to work that out.)

 

[epepke]

People are toruses, topologically. But who cares?

 

[Brian-M]

People are toruses, topologically. But who cares?

And so is a coffee mug. But we're talking geometry, not topology.

(Amusing observation though. Thanks for that.)

 

[catsmate]

Could this be EU/PC related? Those nuts seem fond of the torus..

 

[Beerina]

"All facts in this movie have been independently confirmed."



...except for one very major "fact" in this movie.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

It goes from the torus, to vectors, to free energy, to secret symbols in ancient art, to ancient aliens, to crop circles, to UFOs, to government conspiracies, back to free energy, to the Illuminati, to the New World Order, to agriculture conspiracies, to the fractional reserve system and the Federal Reserve Bank, to the Pentagon, to Big Brother, to FEMA camps, to world domination and forced sterilization. And it hits about every other woo and conspiracy theory in between.

Frankly, the David Icke interview comes off as one of the more rational segments. That’s how weird this thing is.

It is well produced. It starts well and ends sort of well. It starts with a message that there are many problems in the world and we can do better. It ends with some good suggestions: people should be wary of people with a great deal of power (government, large corporations, large media), the Internet needs to maintain freedom of speech, reducing the US military budget. But also some wacky ones: eliminating the Federal Reserve Bank, opposing the World Bank. And some seem conflicting: massively shrinking government, even though it is the unregulated banks causing all the problems.

And it mostly seems to end up with the Libertarian pipe dream: if we get rid of the evil government that props up the evil bankers, then suddenly everybody will be nice to everybody else and not take advantage of anybody else and we will have no disagreements about what does or does not “violate” somebody and have no war and have free energy and plenty of organic food and everything else everybody would ever want for everybody! Yippeee!

Of course it doesn’t address how you will deal with the evil bankers who find different and better ways to exploit and control people once the Fed and the government regulations are gone. Or how the rich evil oil companies won’t continue to the suppress the free energy when there is no government regulation. Or what happens when the free energy torus machines don’t work. Or how once there is all this cheap energy and food that the elite won’t just grab that up to make themselves much, much, much more rich and powerful and better able to control the masses.

It is just a woo-woo train to a Libertarian Utopia where getting rid of government solves every problem.

 

[Brian-M]

"All facts in this movie have been independently confirmed."



...except for one very major "fact" in this movie.

I tend to believe them when they claim that all facts in the movie have been independently confirmed, if only because there is so little information in the movie contains facts of any kind. (Nonfactual assertions are not "facts". And the few facts it does mention must have been confirmed by someone, somewhere.)

It's really clever wording, saying only that the facts have been confirmed, without providing any indication as to which information and assertions are supposed to be factual. If they'd said claims or information, that would be a different matter. But since they said facts, the sentence is effectively meaningless.

 

[Captain_Snort]

I have just watched it.

One or two well worn out utopian ideas and lots and lots of very silly things.

David Icke talking about the banking crises (no mention of reptiloids though) and a thorough misunderstanding of the banking industry.

All seeing eye and NWO scaremongering.

Lots of Free power over unity devices that have been seized by governments, with a 'world renowned physicist' called Adam Trombly, who, it seems when I looked him up has no academic record, no published papers but has his name on a Eu patent application from 1982 (only record I can find of him) for a "co-rotating homopolar generator" (read free energy machine). Also quite a lot discussion about his less than honest self publicising endeavours.

The central motif of a torus being extrapolated to power generation, and to crop circles and UFOs with some mid 1990's style graphical effects. Oh yes, the ancients knew all about it and left coded examples in literature if you look at it in a certain light and apply CGI graphics in transforms.

Urging a move 'back' to organic farming, hey great for the developed world, but would be death sentences for millions upon millions in many parts of the world, a point they happily ignore.

Oh and really annoying background music you get on crappy US TV shows that show someone overcoming an adversity (single piano or small orchestral in a major key, but slowly)

To sum up the film.

Bollocks.

 

[GreyArea]

People are toruses, topologically. But who cares?

If all people are toruses, does that debunk astrology?