If this guy is generating electricity why bother with the paper lighting schtick? Let’s hook him up to a multimeter. I have one in the garage somewhere…Ok this might take some time. Maybe it would be quicker to just run down to Home Depot. Either way, not too hard to find out if he is generating electricity. We can measure the output of an electric eel, why not an electric person? Or is this some sort of special electricity that can’t be measured (which would make it not electricity).
Then what do you support? He is generating electricity but not in the way other organisms do? Then in what way? What is your proof? Or his proof? Or anything at all?
It appears as if they do attempt that here in this new John Chang video, or at least they use a voltmeter which is one function of a multimeter. The results were inconclusive…
However, if one has a switch to turn an electrical mechanism on or off then these results are to be expexted/
To be honest, I have no specific theory as to his power source. Just general ideas…I think an electrician or electrical engineer would be better able to offer a conclusive theory.
Not one that you are going to like, I would bet.
And what kind of ridiculous inference and foment is that?
I got no horse in this race.
Of course you have a horse. You think he is conducting electricity. You don’t know how but that is what you have said you think. I may be wrong but I have a feeling that most engineers will feel it is a parlor trick. Therefore you will be disappointed. I will not bother to quote where you said what you said. It is a short thread, you can read it as well as I can.
Parlor tricks are part of my magic act, something of a specialty. Why would I be disappointed?
Maybe because you said you think it is not a trick? Maybe you are not good at epressing yourself. Go ahead and clarify. Do you think this guy is actually conducting electricity? Do you know of some reason why it would not be able to be measured by a scientific instrument? Do you think it is more reasonable that it was a trick rather than a real event?
If he gets a horse, can I have a pony?
What was it that I said to my daughter when this came up? Oh yeah. Go ask your mother.
Once a debate enters into the realm of arguing not anymore what people said, but what they must have been thinking when they said it, it never gets any better. You’re still just talking past me. I don’t know what to say. Sorry.
Actually, one last try. I hate giving up.
Rather than me trying to guess or infer, please would you explain what you were thinking, and what you wanted people to understand you as saying, when you posted the following statements:
Post #16:
and post #17:
You’ve stated that you were not entertaining certain ideas that, in my plain reading of these posts appear to be entertained. I don’t know what you were thinking when you posted them, neither do I know what you meant, except in as far as reading the words and trying to work it out. What did you mean?, what were you thinking? and what did you want people to understand these posts as meaning?
Ianzin is traveling around America at the moment. He is an invited guest at the rather exclusive FFFF close-up magicians’ convention in Batavia, NY, as I write. Try him again when he gets back to England at the end of the month.
One or two people have mentioned me during this thread. I have been away (as Lynne-42 pointed out) so this is my first chance to respond. However, I’m not sure there’s much for me to say. The facts of the matter speak for themselves.
Has this guy demonstrated his ‘powers’ under controlled conditions that eliminate opportunities for error or fraud? No. Until he does, there’s nothing to try and ‘explain’ because there isn’t any data. At one point in the video, the scientists were trying to investigate his claims in a scientific manner, but (a) they weren’t in a lab or any environment that constitutes ‘controlled conditions’ and (b) I’m not aware that any of them have any specific knowledge of deception as applied to the faking of psychic phenomena.
I think it is significant that when they were somewhat clumsily hooking up voltmerers and so on to Mr Chang, they didn’t get any positive readings. Also, when Mr Chang had had a taste of how closely the scientists wanted to test his claims, he got cold feet and backed out of the tests, citing all this convenient mumbo jumbo about a ghost in the night telling him not to demonstrate his abilities in public. How odd that he has apparantly been healing people with his electric jolts for years… isn’t this ‘demonstrating in public’? And why would this ghost only come and warn him to stop co-operating with the scientists AFTER the first day of shambolic ‘testing’? It seems far more plausible to me to suggest that he took a chance that the scientists would be easy to sucker in, found that they weren’t quite so dumb, and chickened out.
This guy may be the real deal. Perhaps he has impressive and astonising abilities that lie beyond what current scientific knowledge can explain. This is perfectly possible, but it’s unlikely, and so there’s no reason to grant his claims any credence unless and until we have some data that actually supports the claims. Of course, this doesn’t affect what people can choose to believe. It’s a free country. You can believe in pink unicorns if you want to. But if you want to stick to believing in things only if there’s good evidence or good reason to, which I think is quite a good guideline to follow where ‘psychic’ or paranormal claims are concerned, then we are entitled to say ‘no data, nothing to explain’.
One thing I can tell is that the ‘paper sets on fire’ is a trick. Or, to be more strict and more fair, the demonstration as presented in the video is indistinguishable in every way from exactly what it would look like if it were done by trickery. I used the same trick on an old TV discussion show, ‘Leeza’, in 1999. In my case, I caused a borrowed cigarette to spontaneously ignite, just by waving my hand over it. It got so hot that in fact it broke the (totally transparent) glass ashtray on which it was resting at the time. In other contexts and live shows, I’ve made things like envelopes and tissue paper spontaneously ignite using the same method. The method is written up in several different magic books, such as ‘Stranger than fiction’ by Derek Lever, although in that book one specific technical point pertaining to this trick is not explained as clearly as it could be.
ianzin someone screw with your homepage?
Yes Loach, someone seems to have hacked in. I’ve contacted my site hosts and we’ll see what we can do to put things right.
Hope it works out OK.