Student Questions: Orbo, EVPs, and Shakespeare

by Brian Dunning
February 1, 2011

Today's topics come from students in three different countries. We're going to learn about Electronic Voice Phenomena, the martial arts practice of semen retention, the authenticity of Shakespeare's plays, and the benefits of foods said to be high in antioxidants. But first we're going to get started with a quick look at one the world's favorite perpetual motion machines, the infamous Steorn Orbo:

Hi Brian, this is Ubbo from Hamburg, Germany. I was wondering is the Steorn Orbo for real? It's supposed to be a machine that runs with producing excess energy, more than it consumes. The website is www.steorn.com. Thank you.

Sadly, no. The Orbo is one of many, many, many perpetual motion machines with which inventors have tinkered in vain over the years. This particular one is a magnetic motor, wherein magnets are arranged around the outside of a rotor in such an arrangement that, to an inexperienced layperson, it looks like the rotor should be pushed around. My brother spent a decade obsessing over the exact same idea, convinced it would work; and if you search the Internet you'll find that lots of other people have built similar devices.

Steorn gained great notoriety several years ago when they announced their device in a media stunt, and created a buzz by not saying anything about their Orbo device. They assembled a board of scientists who were to verify that it worked, but not surprisingly, they came back with the unanimous verdict that it did not. But the media loves magical solutions, so their public failures have done little to diminish their notoriety.

Steorn has given two public demonstrations of their motor. In the first, it didn't work. In the second, they powered a variant of it using a battery; and then asserted that it had charged the battery more than it drained it, but did not permit this to be verified.

Generally it is not necessary to assess such claims for their validity. The laws of physics prohibit the creation of kinetic energy from nothing, which is a pretty straightforward explanation for why no such device has ever been successfully demonstrated.

Hi. My name is Jessica, I'm from Tucson, Arizona and I am a sophomore in high school. My question is, how does a person who is a self proclaimed expert in EVP's explain how they work?

EVPs are Electronic Voice Phenomena, supposed to be the voices of ghosts that appear on tape recorders at times when the ghost hunters say nothing was audible. I think you've hit the nail on the head by calling these experts "self-proclaimed". EVPs are not scientific by any definition. There is no plausible theory behind how they might exist, they fail to appear whenever controls are applied, and they're not reproducible by other researchers. Thus, the existence of EVPs remains squarely in the territory of "anecdote".

Usually the explanations given by ghost hunters depend on using one unknown to explain another: The voices appear on the tape recording because the spirits are able to manipulate electromagnetic fields that interact with the recorder's electronics in just such a way as to result in a perfect audio recording, with flux distributed on the magnetic tape at just the right amplitude and frequency. How ghosts acquired this intricate knowledge of recording electronics and an invisible dipole electromagnet is not convincingly argued.

That's not to say EVPs don't exist; if they did, it would be an exciting discovery with broad implications across many sciences. No doubt many ghost hunters have indeed honestly acquired recordings of sounds they're unable to explain; but science does not allow us to make the jump from "unexplained" to "conclusively explained as a ghost". The cause of the recording could be just as reasonably explained as a beam from the planet Neptune, from a shipwrecked spacefarer named Frank who crashed there in the year 1642 after a journey from Regulus. There are an infinite number of possibilities if your only criteria is "it must be conceiveable" rather than "there must be at least some evidence".

So, Jessica, according to what's known today, there is no such thing as an expert in EVPs.

Hi. I'm Jon Peder from the University of Bergen in Norway My question is: Is there anything to semen retention? Any positive or negative effects?

Semen retention is a practice recommended by some martial arts experts and practioners of traditional Chinese medicine. It refers to the control or prevention of ejaculation by applying pressure to block the ejaculatory duct. It has its basis in jing, which is one of the life force energies that the prescientific Chinese believed to exist, like qi. From a review of the published literature, it seems that different advocates have different takes on it. Some say you should always practice semen retention in order to keep yourself powerful by retaining jing; others say that a carefully followed regimen of ejaculation and retention is best to assure the proper management of jing.

Since jing exists only as a traditional belief and does not exist in the literal sense, there is little actual reason to practice semen retention. So far as I was able to find, there is little or no discussion of it outside of martial arts circles. Some martial artists speak of potential capillary damage from repeated practice, but I did not find this echoed in medical literature.

There's no medical reason to either ejaculate often or to prevent it. Spermatozoa, which are produced constantly, live for about three days, and once they die, they are disposed of by your body just like any other waste. The seminal fluid is also constantly being secreted and reabsorbed. These processes continue independently of whether or not you ejaculate. So if your sensei tells you to retain your semen to increase your life essence, it's probably not going to hurt you to do so; but neither is there any plausible benefit. It's just one more weird thing you can do with your body if it gives you jollies.

Hello Brian Dunning, this is Stephen from California. I would like to hear your take on the opinion that Shakespeare was not the real author of Shakespearean literature.

This is an interesting question, and one that may be worthy of its own complete Skeptoid episode. But we can summarize a quick answer here.

There is indeed a subculture of Shakespeare skeptics, who believe that Shakespeare (if he existed at all) was not the author of the many great plays with that byline. Many alternate candidates have been put forward, with the most common nominee being the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Although such suspicions are interesting, it's important to keep in mind that they are in the severe minority, with nearly all serious historians and Shakespearian scholars dismissing the claims as nonsense. Fringe ideas are almost certainly wrong; when they turn out to be right, they move into the mainstream and are no longer on the fringe. Shakespeare skepticism has so far failed to make that transition.

The Shakespeare skeptics are principally motivated by an absence of evidence that Shakespeare lived. He left no diaries, letters, or original manuscripts. But it turns out that this was not unusual for authors of the time. We have no such documents for Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe either.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to accept Shakespeare as the real author is his unique and recognizable writing style, which does not match that of the authors to which his works have been attributed by doubters. And this is not merely an unreliable, subjective opinion: It's backed by hard science. There is a branch of computer science called computational stylistics which can analyze a given author's writings to form what we call a literary fingerprint. Shakespeare has a unique literary fingerprint, as does every author, that differentiates his writing from others with very high probability. Work done at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown not only that Shakespeare was the author of his own works, they've also determined conclusively that he had co-authored or revised works by others that had long been suspected but never proven. They were also able to show which authors had influenced Shakespeare's plays, and which other playwrights had been influenced by him.

None of this is absolutely infallible, of course, but the fact remains that all available evidence supports Shakespeare as a real living author, and the only support for the opposing viewpoint is supposition.

Hi Brian. My name is Thomas Gebert from Florida State University. I was wondering: What are the documented medical benefits from anti-oxidants that a lot of foods are claiming to have?

We went into this in some detail in Skeptoid #86 about so-called "superfruit" juices. In summary, it's probably not something that the average healthy person needs to worry about. People selling miracle diet plans and miracle supplements are likely to tell you differently, but the management of free radical oxidation is something your body handles pretty well on its own.

Here's how it works. Oxidation happens when a free radical, which is a molecule with an unpaired electron, forms a covalent bond with another molecule in your body, thus oxidizing it and changing its ability to interact chemically. Antioxidants inhibit this action. The fact is that the human body is extremely complex, and it maintains complicated systems of different types of antioxidants in various self-regulating supplies. Oxidation is essential for life. It's how the body converts fat into energy, it fights bacteria, and it does lots of other things. Antioxidants regulate this activity. This is necessary because oxidation also does bad things that you don't want. Managing this constant balancing act is something that the body does very well.

Products are easily sold with oversimplified scare pitches: Oxidation is bad, antioxidants prevent it, our product has antioxidants. Each of these statements is an incomplete truth, and the facts are far more complex than that. If you eat anything close to three squares a day, you're already getting more antioxidants than your body will make use of. But every claim is worth testing. And what we've found by testing antioxidant supplements is that they do not provide any of the claimed benefits, such as preventing cancers or heart disease. Yes they're good, and your body needs them, but there is no reason to supplement with them. In fact, one large 2007 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that supplementation does more harm than good. So continue eating a normal healthy diet, and don't spin your wheels seeking out miracle foods that claim to be high in antioxidants.

Students, keep those questions coming in. Just go to Skeptoid.com and click on Student Questions to get your answer right here.

By Brian Dunning
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