A Torsional Pendulum That Detects and Measures What May Be a Form of Bioenergy
J. Norman Hansen
Professor of Biochemistry, Emeritus
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland USA
Many people believe that humans and other living organisms produce fields of bioenergy that permeate and extend beyond the periphery of these organisms. Scientific experiments designed to detect these biofields have consistently failed, so the concept of bioenergy has no scientific credibility. The idea in this experimental approach is that the devices used to detect these fields may be inappropriate in that they typically detect some type of photon energy. If biofields do not consist of components of the electromagnetic spectrum, a different type of detector should be employed. These experiments employ a detector that is designed to detect a physical “pushing” force instead of being a detector of photons. The detector used here is a simple torsional pendulum that is suspended above the subject. The experimental design includes a video camera connected to a computer that can detect and measure the pendulum movements with high precision, and store this information into a data file for later analysis.
Experiments show that the pendulum detects and measures substantial forces which drastically alter the motions of the pendulum when a subject is seated under it. The following effects are consistently observed with every subject in every experiment performed up to now.
1. Substantial shifts of the center of oscillation of the pendulum; shifts as large as 2.2 cm
(7 deg) requiring a force that is equivalent to 45 mg, are observed.
2. Many new frequencies of oscillation of the pendulum are introduced when a subject is present. 3. Dramatic changes in the amplitudes of oscillation of the pendulum are observed throughout the experiment: increasing, decreasing, and increasing again, in quasi-consistent patterns.
4. These shifts of the center of oscillation, the new frequencies of oscillation, and the changes in amplitudes all persist for 30–60 min after the subject has left the pendulum. This is inconsistent with the physics of a simple harmonic oscillator such as a torsional pendulum, which should return to simple harmonic oscillation immediately after any exterior disturbances are discontinued.
It is important that the effects on the pendulum are substantial, so one does not need statistical analysis to demonstrate that these effects have occurred, because they are obvious upon inspection of the data.
After conducting control experiments, especially with respect to the possible effects of subject- generated air currents on the pendulum, it is concluded that the effects are exerted by some kind of force field that is generated by the subject seated under the pendulum. We know of no force, such as one within the electromagnetic spectrum, which can account for these results. The idea that a previously unknown force is responsible is difficult to accept. It is therefore expected that a conventional explanation will be discovered, but it is difficult to identify a conventional force that can explain these results. It is important that other investigators repeat and confirm these observations.
Recorded at the 31st annual SSE Conference in 2012 at the Millennium Hotel in Boulder, Colorado, USA.
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Published on November 14, 2018
