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BioGeometry: My friend thought I should ponder on it.
by Don Lacey on Jun. 11, 2013, under Critical Thinking, Education, Freethought, Reason, Sanity, Science, Skepticism, Willful Ignorance

BioGeometryOnce again, “my friend” from South America sent me a link that he found interesting. He said the information “resonated” with him and believed that it had a good foundation—scientifically and historically. Here is the LINK he sent. It’s the FAQ page on BioGeometry. The first question is, “What is BioGeometry?” That’s a great place to start! Here is what it says:

It is a design language of shape that balances energy fields. Energy is the ability to produce an effect. Vitality, emotional and mental activities are energy and can be balanced geometrically. Since everything has shape and energy, then we can apply it in any field. This is the language of the shapes of nature that we unfortunately do not read. We are so busy reading our own writing and fail to perceive natures’ language. BioGeometry® is the way of reading the energy workings in all fields of life. It is a new holistic universal worldview. It is like widening the window we are looking through to include all what is invisible at this moment. The paranormal becomes part of the normal, and spirituality becomes part of science.

What Dr. Ibrahim Karim, an Eqyptian Architect, has managed to do is combine the nightmare high school subjects, Biology and Geometry, with one of the least understood concepts in physics, Energy. I had heard of something similar to this concept from one of the Skeptics of Tucson members. He now lives in Colorado but he used to come to our meetings. He has a book out Matthew 10:10 Travels of an Awareness. He also has a website and a Meetup.com group. His idea is, “We, and all life, exist as the Energy of this Universe, aware of itself. It is that simple.” It may seem simple and clear to him, but it sounds deluded to others. After reading the definition of BioGeometry, it was a bit difficult to stay enthused. It was going into serious delusion territory. My reply:

David,

Ponder this…real knowledge of science beats pseudoscience every time. Let’s start with the first premise. Don’t blow past the premises without checking them out. All arguments made after faulty premises may not be invalid but if the arguments depend on them explicitly, they will be.

“Energy is the ability to produce an effect. Vitality, emotional and mental activities are energy and can be balanced geometrically.” This is not correct.

Energy is the ability to do work. In physics, we learn that potential energy on the earth can often be represented by a relationship with gravity, the mass of the object, and the height above ground or E=mgh where m is mass, g is the acceleration do to gravity (9.8 m/s2) and h is the height above ground. Another form of energy is kinetic energy. It is the energy contained in a moving body. K=mv2 where K, the kinetic energy, is equal to the mass of the body multiplied by the velocity (v) squared.

Space is not energy. The way you feel is not energy. We get all of our energy from the chemicals in our food. The chemical energy is converted to work and other forms of energy through processes including oxidation and some anaerobic processes. Most of the potential energy in your automobile is also bound in chemistry–in the gas tank and in the storage battery. In most cars, the energy in the fuel is what makes the car go, not the number of coats of wax on its bonnet. It doesn’t matter how good the car looks, without gas or a large hill to roll down, a car isn’t going anywhere. Poking pins in people’s skin or wearing a certain type of jewelry is a lot like the coats of wax on your car’s bonnet. The pins and the jewelry may make you feel better or even look better but wont’ change or balance energy levels.

Energy can’t be created or destroyed. You can only change its form. Consider the pendulum—a large weight hanging from a string. Raise the weight and all the energy is potential. Let the pendulum swing, and the pure potential energy will convert to pure kinetic then back to pure potential as it stops moving at the end of its swing. There are always losses in the exchange so the pendulum will eventually stop but if the losses are small, it will oscillate for a very long time.

David, I don’t have time to go over all of the problems with the claims made by BioGeometry but I will cover their answer to #5 since I’m an electrical engineer and familiar with these types of claims:

“5. Can it reduce harmful side effects of computers, cellular phones, and other such devices? When we interact with a computer or a cellular phone, the electromagnetic fields produced by the device are a thousand times more than the energy of our cells…”

Electromagnetic radiation travels through space in quantized particles. To understand why that is important when we’re trying to assess the potential damage that can be caused to people when they are exposed to electromagnetic radiation please consider the shotgun. You can load up a shotgun with very small particles like salt or you can load it up with 38 caliber pellets. The amount of energy in the cartridge remains the same but you’re more likely to be injured or killed when hit with the large lead ball than with the blast of salt. The energetic particles in the electromagnetic spectrum are similar. Microwave energy beamed at you may warm you up but it won’t cause the kind of damage that a burst of X-rays would do. The X-rays are higher frequency and therefore contain more energy in the particles. Electromagnetic radiation falls on a spectrum only the highest frequencies are considered “ionizing, “ in other words, cell damaging. While microwave radiation may cook you, it won’t cause molecular damage. Computers, cell phones, and other devices do not put out ionizing radiation, especially now that our monitors no longer use cathode ray tubes…

If you want to really learn more about this stuff, it’s not hard to find the information. Please verify what I tell you by looking it up for yourself at [en.wikipedia.org]


[en.wikipedia.org]

Don Lacey

In his reply he stated that BioGeometry seemed reasonably scientific to him but he hasn’t read my “long” response. Perhaps “my friend” is beyond help.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 11th, 2013 at 23:40 and is filed under Critical Thinking, Education, Freethought, Reason, Sanity, Science, Skepticism, Willful Ignorance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Philip SpaceMuseum MacDuff
Bullshit detector lesson one: scientific truths are never copyrighted, patented, or trademarked. Bogus pseudoscientific TRUTHS are, because someone is trying to make money off them. Great post Don, and good rebuttal of the BioGeometry nonsense.

tiponeill
If people would just learn a TINY bit of linguistic analysis – you don’t need to become a professional philosopher – they would recognize nonsense like this at first glance, and the world would be spared a lot of garbage.

I recommend “Language, Truth and Logic” as a popularization primer.

[www.amazon.com]

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Isn't BioGeometry a fake science?
Eman Aly
Thursday, 19 August 2010 19:47 UTC

I am so dissappointed that our egyptian media intoduce to the public persons who claim they are doing Science and in fact they are not. Look for example
[www.biogeometry.com]

Dr Ibrahim Kraim has appeared on Almehwar channel as a great scientist doing a great job
[www.facebook.com]

We lack scientific journalism and scientific culture.

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This forum is closed.
Mohammed Yahia
20 August 2010 | 12:20

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#1

Thanks for raising this issue Eman.

I agree with you completely, there is a very real problem with science journalism in the Arab world.

On one hand, science journalism IS still in its infancy and that is why there are so many missteps, but on the other hand, these missteps end up misinforming thousands who are starting to care about science and scientists.

The problem is the journalists don’t know how to be critical of every person who claims to be a scientist. Ibrahim Karim is not the first – nor the last – person who brings a new form of pseudoscience and presents it to people as a respectable new discovery.

I think the problem is on three stages:

1) The journalists do not understand the proper sequence of scientific thought. They do not understand the concepts of peer-reviewing and how to know if a scientist is for real or fake.

2) The journalists are looking for stories that make a bang! They want to sell and that is their right at the end of the day. So they look for stories that will generate a lot of interest, disregarding how right or accurate they are.

3) The people themselves are hungry for a story where their native scientists are heroes. So a story about an Egyptian scientist who creates a new branch of science fills them with pride. And they have no way of knowing whether it is a real science or pseudoscience.

Jonata Giuliani
16 May 2011 | 14:02

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#5

thanks Eman for posting this, the funniest part is that he seems to have even copyrighted the word of this new “discipline”: BioGeometry®