Wednesday, February 16, 2005

PseudoScience Goldmine

The Crystal Links website is a gold mine of pseudoscience. Ellie Crystal, the creator of the website, is a fantastic example of a particularly insidious type of scam artist. She uses a combination of pseudoscience, cult spirituality, and mixes in some actual science she cut and paste from encyclopedia.com to lure vulnerable people into buying her book. Check out her bio, in which she wows you with her tales of encountering telepathic aliens, the ghost Z that guides her, and of course her emergence as a famous psychic. It would take too much time to list all the examples of pseudoscience in her website, but I'll just list a few highlights

1) Tachyon Energy - She claims that Tachyon particles(particles that go faster than light) form the human spirit energy known as chi, Aura, etc. For any nonscientists out there, Einstein's theory of relativity states that no particles may travel faster than light, and so far no experiment has ever detected a particle that exceeds the speed of light.

2) Healing and Energy - A concise list of spiritual healing quackery that rips off trusting consumers of billions of dollars a year. Some of the more famous examples listed in her directory of medical scams are magnetic healing, and psychic surgery.

3) Pendulums and Dowsing - If you believe this crap, you need to take a high school physics class. The pendulum knows all! But make sure you only ask your question once. (I died inside a little after reading this garbage)