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More on Hutchison

What follows is a response made by a visitor to a post I wrote some time ago called “The Discovery Channel is Bogus!”. Read the original post and the response here to get the context.

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Richard, thanks for dropping by the site. I appreciate your comments, and I’d like to respond to them one at a time, starting with this one:

“an object is either held [by] a magnet or it isn’t. once a magnetic field is too weak to hold an object up, the object falls, there is no medium ground that would allow an object to be slowly lowered. and even if this was possible, it does not explain why the objects flip around and move horizontally also.”

There was no “middle ground” where the object was being “slowly lowered”. The object was on the surface of the wood and then would reluctantly detach, but as soon as it lost contact with the wood it immediately rose (or fell, I would argue) off the screen. This is consistent with an object that is held in place behind the wood (it’s interesting that the surface is wood, a material with no magnetic properties) by an electromagnet with decreasing current – as soon as the object loses contact with the surface the magnetic field no longer holds it in place and it falls. I did not see any video that showed the object moving horizontally once it detached from the surface.

“he mentions the string as if it is proof positive that [H]utchison is a fake. but i guess he fails to realize that in order for his theory about the electromagnet and upside down camera to be accurate. the toy UFO would have to be standing on the end of the string instead of hanging from it.”

In the case of the object held by a string, an electromagnet isn’t necessary, all you need is a string (in fact, I said that that clip didn’t “fit in well with my upside-down electromagnet hoax idea”). All that’s happening here is an object attached to a string, a laughably transparent trick. Watch this video, where you can clearly see a string in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I think it speaks for itself.

You also say that my “most convincing point is that [H]utchison himself dresses funny and has unusual stuff in his apartment”. How Hutchison looks or what he has in his apartment is irrelevant to my criticism and was merely included for some flavour and context, it’s certainly not my “most convincing point” or even a point at all.

I am not familiar with all of the so-called Hutchison Effects, so I will limit my criticism to his claims that he is able to inexplicably overcome gravity and levitate objects. This is a clear case of pseudoscience – false claims that do not comply with the scientific method. His levitation “experiments” have these characteristics of pseudoscience:

– They contradict experimentally established results
– They fail to provide an experimental possibility of reproducible results
– They violate Occam’s Razor

I think an explanation of these three characteristics would be interesting to many of my readers. First, his “levitation” contradicts experimentally established results. In fact, his claims to be able to levitate objects run counter to a vast body of theories and evidence, like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (which deals with gravity among other things) and the enormous number of experiments that have verified this theory.

Second, his levitation “experiments” fail to provide reproducible results. An experiment should be reproducible, that is, you should be able to tell someone else what to do to get the same results you got. That’s why real scientists document every step of an experiment, so that other scientists can try it themselves to see that it works or doesn’t work. Hutchison doesn’t do that, maybe because instructing someone to tie a string to an object and jerk it around is a little embarrassing.

The third characteristic is a really damning criticism of Hutchison’s levitation claims, which is that they violate Occam’s Razor, the principle that when “multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred”. When looking at Hutchison’s levitation claims, we are faced with two possibilities: 1) that Einstein was wrong and our conception of space, time and gravity is thus completely incorrect, in spite of the fact that this theory accurately describes the motion of the planets, has been verified in thousands of experiments and has led to inventions like the atom bomb, or 2) that an eccentric fraud is dangling some objects from a string and claiming levitation or otherwise deceiving people.

Einstein produced theories (subsequently verified by experiments), Hutchison produces videotapes. Whether or not he deceives people using string, magnets or some other mechanism is irrelevant. I have seen videotape that looked entirely real of a man capable of flying from building to building because he shoots a sticky web from his hands, but that doesn’t mean I think Spiderman really exists. David Copperfield is able to make a 747 vanish in front of crowds of people, but no one believes it’s anything more than large-scale sleight-of-hand.

Hutchison’s levitation claims don’t even stand up to common sense. If he could levitate objects in the 1970s, where are the inventions today that are based on his inventions? The invention of jet engines quickly led to jet aircraft, why hasn’t the invention of levitation led to levitation aircraft? Aren’t the applications of such an invention obvious?

What’s interesting to me about your impassioned defense of Hutchison is that you care so much. There are scientific theories and experiments that are even more remarkable than what Hutchison claims to be able to do that are genuine (for instance, the relative nature of time, knowledge that Einstein, once again, brought us) but I doubt that you feel as passionate about these theories as you do about Hutchison’s claims or probably many other pseudoscientific claims.

I think this is because pseudoscience is much like religion: it satisfies people’s desires for the unexplainable, the mysterious, the supernatural. If objects can levitate, perhaps we can levitate ourselves and fly – perhaps we can invent a time machine – perhaps there are aliens among us. When real science comes along to debunk these claims, the believers in pseudoscience react emotionally, not rationally, because these criticisms strike at that inner desire to believe in “something more”. Or perhaps just because they realize that they just don’t stand up to rational criticism.

If you get a chance, pick up a copy of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, which does a great job of comparing pseudoscience with the genuine scientific method.

72 Responses to “More on Hutchison”
  1. matt:

    “I think this is because pseudoscience is much like religion: it satisfies people’s desires for the unexplainable, the mysterious, the supernatural. If objects can levitate, perhaps we can levitate ourselves and fly – perhaps we can invent a time machine – perhaps there are aliens among us. When real science comes along to debunk these claims, the believers in pseudoscience react emotionally, not rationally, because these criticisms strike at that inner desire to believe in “something more”. Or perhaps just because they realize that they just don’t stand up to rational criticism.”

    You hit the nail on the head. May I quote you?

  2. someskeptic:

    You are a little too ready to claim “pseudoscience” when you already know you can use ordinary magnets to do the same thing without violating the theory of relativity, occam’s razor, and you can reproduce the results. Heck, scientists have gotten a frog (non-metal) to levitate with magnetic fields and it was stable. Hutchison may indeed be having one over on you, or is a little underhanded, misguided or whatever, but levitation is not pseudoscience. Don’t claim it is just so you can complain–it makes you no better than someone with a saucer on a string. Look up diamagnetism.

    http://www.hfml.science.ru.nl/levitate.html

  3. Ade:

    It should be clear that the levitation claimed by Hutchison is quite different from that achieved by magnets or by propellers, as the site you linked to described: ” a helicopter can be considered as a very impressive levitation device that uses a stream of air to keep floating”.

    If you – or they – want to call that levitation, that’s fine. Mag-lev trains also fit into this category too. But there’s no comparison between these well-understood, common-place technologies and the sort of almost-supernatural levitation that Hutchison is apparently capable of producing. There’s a reason the site you linked to says “the real levitation” – it’s to distinguish what it’s talking about from the sort of thing claimed by Hutchison.

  4. condor:

    grade-school logic and desperately googling for something intelligent to say: a truly pathetic (and ridiculously unscientific) rebuttal. that little quoted definition about pseudoscience really boosted the intelligence meter, as did reference to einstein, which in no shape or form actually apply in this situation. go take a high-school physics class, why don’t you.

    in fact, simple “levitation”, by definition, can easily be achieved by a ring of transformers radially placed with a current running through them, creating magnetic flux which keeps the object afloat and spinning. it’s what the modern subways in shanghai and tokyo use, coupled with magnetically-induced velocity to accel the train. thirty years ago something like this would also have been labeled “pseudoscience”, complete with people with egos as large as yours pretending to cynically know a thing or two.


  5. Ade,

    The section I enjoyed most in your argument was how you rationalized the gullibility of people – it’s completely true that people have a desire for the unexplained and become passionate in its defence. Maybe even moreso with the internet. Sure, the internet is widely used by, well, everyone, but your average Agent Skully loving, Vulcan impersonating, Jedi-mind-tricking, UFO-landing-pad-building, enthused defender of all things pseudoscience is much more likely to find himself on, say, a website debunking The Hutchison Effect than he is checking stocks.

    The internet has fueled so many idiotic conspiracy theories and bogus scientific claims in the past that we can’t be surprised when the cycle simply continues. These are perpetuated by the same kinds of people that read The Da Vinci Code 13 times and then dig of French graves expecting to find something.

    You know, I sometimes envy these people – clearly they live in a more exciting world than I do. I sometimes wish that I could escape common sense, play some records backwards and point my telescope at the sky with them. But unfortunately I find myself grounded in a world of logic in reason.

    It’s actually quite depressing sometimes.

  6. em:

    “an object is either held [by] a magnet or it isn’t. once a magnetic field is too weak to hold an object up, the object falls, there is no medium ground that would allow an object to be slowly lowered. and even if this was possible, it does not explain why the objects flip around and move horizontally also.”

    Two electromagnets. One at the top of this container (the ‘bottom’ of the video), we shall call ‘A’, that holds an object against the ceiling (the ‘floor’ of the video’) – upwards force (the magnet) exceeds downward force (gravity). An electromagnet at the bottom of this container (the ‘top’ of the video), we shall call ‘B’, is gradually fed more current (be it via a variable resistor or some other means). The object will hang in a magnet field between the two, going closer to A as B’s power is reduced, going closer to B as it’s power is increased. Another magnet to the side of the container will draw the object horizontally across.

    To my understanding of magnetism, that would work.

  7. daskook:

    Ok…whether or not you believe this work to be science or psuedoscience is not really the issue.

    Is Hutchinson capable of moving forward with his claims since his discovery in the 1970’s? If something was truly discovered with such obvious usefullness….where are the subsequent applications???

    Oh……and the ice cream levitation is so easy to explain I cant believe I havent seen it on one of these blogs! He puts a steel slug in the bottom of the cup….fills it with ice cream….chills it so its solid….energizes his electromagnet and sets the cup upside down on the plywood and turns on the camera and tapes the ice cream melting. Watch the video of the ice cream and think about it. It melts a bit…..a glob “floats out of view” and then Hutchinson turns off the electromagnet and voila! Levitation illusion!

    I dont think Hutchinson is such a bad character….but his presentations are pretty easy to see through. Oh, and I think I know how his metal melting is done too. I recognize the alloy he is using and its something used in medicine all the time. It has a very low melting point and a microwave beam or ultrasonic beam could induce enough localized heat to melt it enough to allow other objects resting on it to sink in. Cool….but not really a major advance in physical science. I mean, Hutchinson never does say what metals he is using or what kind of strange transformations he is seeing.

  8. corbinj:

    in response to condor’s comments:

    Einstein’s presence in this rebuttal serves to contrast Hutchison’s poorly demonstrated videos with the rigorous scientific testing real science undergoes.

    Your examples of levitation are excellent examples of levitation which have been proven and accepted, but nonetheless fail to defend Hutchinson’s experiments, which claim new phenomena that apparently contradicts many proven laws of science. Moreover, the magrails of tokyo would certainly not have been dubbed “pseudoscience”, as the concepts were readily tested and proved.

  9. Jeff:

    All of the effects demonstrated can easily be duplicated by any decent magician with a video camera. And they have been. I’ve seen it done.

    My advice to Mr. Hutchinson is to create his effects against the backdrop of his lovely apartment window, thus giving some perspective on the rest of the gravity bound Earthliings driving and walking in Canada.

    Using a simple plywood stage set-up that can be rotated with the camera to produce such effects is child’s play.

    Put that in your pipe Mr. Hutchinson.

    – Jeff

  10. sceptic:

    Hutchinson should learn from the videos of Criss Angel…

    Criss Angel’s videos are more believable with public’s testimonials!

    Criss is making more money as a magician since he does not package himself as a scientist!

    Bad career move for Hutchinson…


  11. I am a physicist who has been studying, as a hobby, the anti-gravity brand of pseudoscience for over 15 years. Huchison is just one of hundreds of similar inventors. They have no replicable evidence, and there is not even a hint of any exploitable or testable anti-gravity theory. All of the so-called experimental evidence, including Podkletnov’s, is due merely to a wilful ignorance of known (but unusual) effects and an over-enthusiatic and biased interpretation of what is observed. A worrying aspect of this nonsense is that they are wasting lots of money: NASA, for instance spent millions on trying to reproduce Podkletnov’s results. Physicists said that his paper was rubbish from the outset, but ‘engineers’ and other non-scientists continued to take it seriously. Unfortunately, when the layman hears that NASA, Lockheed, British Aerospace and NATO are taking anti-gravity seriously, he does not simultaneously hear all of the millions of physicists who are screaming that these organisations are idiots. Or are they: large companies are ‘crackpot-friendly’; if for no better reason than that research that cannot succeed is a good tax write-off scam. Think ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and you will get the idea!

  12. Impossible is nothing:

    Levitron a small brilliant device patented from R.Harrigan in the early 90’s hovers in mid air for about 2 minutes only by using two permament magnets.
    Is this now also pseudoscience? I don’t think so…
    Scientists and mathematicians like Earnshaw thought that this is an impossibility also developed theorems that exluded this kind of levitation!
    Many mathematicians also thought that flying machines heavier than air is also an impossibility!
    These people also thought of the Wright Brothers as hoaxers!
    The new airplanes crossed the atlantic and those kind of pseudo-skeptics-scientists kept believing that the whole scene was a hoax!
    So face it. Physicists don’t know all about nature.. science and theories gets revised many times.
    Give room to new inventors and their inventions.
    You may surprised of what the outcome will be for the future of humanity.
    Impossible is nothing.

  13. C R Swanson:

    I had somehow been blissfully unaware of Mr Hutchison and his “theories”. I’m not sure how, but I rather wish I could go back in time and find a way to keep myself unaware of them. Perhaps one of his associates might have a time machine that works as well as his anti-grav device? Or perhaps could build something else useful? Like a sarcasm detector? (Oh, a sarcasm detector! Oh, that’s REAL useful!)

    I happened across these “theories” last night… well, early this morning… while chanel surfing. Unwilling to watch a documentry on Jonestown or to see Anderson Cooper talk about murders in the inner city and how they’re being ignored because the media isn’t covering them (ah, nothing like a little media navel-gazing), I flipped through the channels until I came across Disocvery Science. Ah, I thought. This is a good channel. This should be fun! I like this station!

    Ah… fool that I was…

    The videos I saw did, admitedly, distract me from the sort of Internet surfing that bachelors tend to do at 2am on a Saturday (Wikipedia browsing of course… why, what did you think I meant?). I thought it looked pretty cool and interesting! I thought, hey, someone has a camera and they’re filming stuff upside down! Neat… ish… I guess…

    Then along came Mr Hutchison. I looked upon him and decided that I was relieved that Canada is not the perfect country I thought it was. In addition to Celene Dion, they’ve vomited this fellow up onto the world stage.

    I won’t bash on his personal appearance too much. Ad hominem (sp?) attacks don’t much do it for me. However, I will say that if *I* was appearing on TV to defend some claims I knew other people might not take seriously, I’d damn well make sure I got my hands on a three-piece suit!

    But I digress.

    I have no real scientific training. I majored in logic and English Lit in college (thus I work in tech support). But I do know how to think, and I’ve watched every episode of “Bullshit!” to date (well, except for the “Holier Than Thou” one. Showtime doesn’t seem to repeat it, and the rest of the 3rd season was fairly disapointing to me, so I haven’t bought the DVDs yet). I’d like to think I have at least some basic sense as well.

    So when I saw these vids, impressive though they (slightly), were, and when I listened to Mr Hutchison and his claims, I thought to myself, well, this is pretty simple. All we have to do is replicate the effect and that’s the end of the debate. However, then he started going off about how the CIA and Canadian Intelligence (which I hadn’t even really been aware there was a Canadian Intelligence service. Of course there must be. How else to keep the seals from rising up?), had conspired against him and removed some of his equipment, I knew we were onto a total turkey.

    One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In the case of Mr Hutchison he hasn’t offered ANY evidence. All he is are his rather easily duplicated videos and a slightly interesting story.

    They also showed on this… er… show… him making batteries that will last “forever”. This is likely true for a given value of forever. The only thing I’ll say about them is that I’m sure they function as well as all other perpetual motion devices.

    Now to respond to “To Impossible is Nothing”…

    You forget to mention one rather salient point. The Wright brothers were capable of reproducing their feat. Thus we have airplanes, jets, the space program and, sadly, Sea-Tac International (as Douglas Adams once observed, there’s a reason no language ever coined the phrase “pretty as an airport”). The existence of vidoes prove only the existence of cameras (well, and video tape, some lights, a set, a photographer and a few other things, but let’s not belabor the point). If Mr Hutchison wishes to be taken seriously, let him step up. Let him prove what he claims.

    Otherwise let’s relagate him to the ashbin of science history.

  14. #1sKEpTIc:

    You know the illusion of knowledge, is the greatest challenge for great minds to overcome…


  15. dear mr hutch, may i suggest that u use ur talents to find a process that will make polymers biodegradeable so that our planet will b cleaner and greener. hope u succeed in this endeavor.let all scientifically minded individuals strive for tne sake of our ecology. tnx

  16. bALAnced PERCeptIOns:

    In reply to c r swanson, what we seem to forget is this system is based on oil. A change to a system based on a on zero point anti gravity energy et cetra (if at all possible) away from aeroplanes and fossil fuels would up be an upheaval in developed society never heard of before.
    One theory that is true is ‘the need to know’ uttered by the military industrial complex.

    As regards to Hutchinson, look at who is a major funder of his research. For the larger part he is a stooge.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Townsend_Brown

  17. P.Penn:

    Ok, no 3-piece suit, lack of grooming, questionable appearance..what else?
    Ah, scientific training, credentials, repeatability, applicability of the one time
    successful experiments. By the way, there is theory at the background, question is
    are the Hutchinson”s experiments the only proof of it? Look in Wiki for more.
    Regardless of the deficiencies according the the trained scientific minds , sure ,
    carrier minded as well, one ought to keep their mind open to recognize new possibility.
    That’s right, as incredible and uncredited Hutchinson’s claims may be, they deserve
    experiments record verification , not early ridicule and outright rejection.
    Then and only then the jury is out.

  18. DL:

    The heck with Einstein! General relativity only has about 3 experimentally reproduceable results–though the calculation of the orbit of Mercury is a particularly beautiful and convincing one. Try Newton! His work has held for over 300 years and is completely valid in its domain of applicability (not sub-atomic, for which you need QM, or large velocities, for which you need relativity).

    This stuff is classic pseudo science!

  19. DL:

    p.s. The guy who calls you an idiot should learn to spell.

  20. S Levek:

    “Levitron a small brilliant device patented from R.Harrigan in the early 90’s hovers in mid air for about 2 minutes only by using two permament magnets.
    Is this now also pseudoscience? I don’t think so…”

    The original poster (ADE) never says levitation is pseudoscience. Perhaps the word levitation should have also been in quotations…

    “His levitation “experiments” have these characteristics of pseudoscience:”

    See? Ade is saying these ‘levitation experiements’ are pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience because Hutchinson is making these effects look like levitation, when its trickery.

    In fact, if any of this was real, then it would be in a scientific journal of some kind. How the hell can you expect to say “it’s true. trust me. look at the video” and have people believe you? Hutchinson can make up as many stories as he likes about having scientists believeing his theory. But you know what? THIS IS NOT PROOF. THE VIDEOS ARE NOT PROOF. Proof is obtained when other scientists duplicate the results. If this was real, why the hell is this guy choosing not to publish his methods, materials… whatever. He got away with this BS in the 70s because there was no internet. It doesnt work so well today.

    My ultimatum to Hutchinson: publish your findings, methods, etc etc. It is already known as the Hutchinson Effect, so you’ll get your credit. What have you got to lose?

  21. DS:

    “a ring of transformers radially placed with a current running through them, creating magnetic flux which keeps the object afloat and spinning. it’s what the modern subways in shanghai and tokyo use”

    No, it’s not. There are no magnetic ‘modren’ subways in Tokyo that use the method you describe.

    Or anything like it.