Thanks. Usually Google is excellent at showing relevant Wikipedia pages. Don't know why it fails in this instance. There must be some kind of reference compared to which phase is measured. I wonder if that is done by also sending a single reference on a different wavelength or if it is done by very fine-tuned clocks and knowledge of transmission time. Seems like a reference phase would be by far the easiest and most robust solution.

I'm down with polarity, but what is a phase of light and what does it mean to use 4 of them? Google isn't giving me any love on that.

Science is a luxury in the same way that a bridge or a road or a port is a luxury. Sure, it is possible for you to haul your cargo and unload your ships without such luxuries, but fast forward 50 years and suddenly you have no infrastructure and you find yourself a third world country. But yeah, on a horizon of 1 or 2 years, it's a terrible investment, a luxury.

Your post is below an x-ray image used to show an "energy field" to bolster BadAnalogyGuy's claim. That is where the x-rays come from. So your statement that I'm using a straw man is itself a straw man. Auras emanate around people, which is the difference between having an aura and, well, I guess being shiny. Nothing can ever be shown to be impossible, so saying that something is not proven impossible is a vacuous statement that does nothing to recommend any particular view. That does not imply that we should take all statements seriously, and I'm sure that in your life you make a practice of taking somethings not seriously even though they aren't impossible - since nothing is impossible.

Yes, so a claim that aura readers read auras by using an undisclosed source of x-rays (including before x-rays were discovered), would then at least be slightly less ridiculous on the basic physics front. It seems we agree. Btw backscatter x-ray does not need the x-rays to pass all the way through the body - what is recorded is the x-rays that bounce back, not the x-rays that go through. The completely ridiculous claim is not that someone somewhere might be able to perceive electromagnetic radiation outside the visible spectrum (surely we can all detect some of that just by the heating it causes on our skin or the disease it causes through high enough exposure). The ridiculous claim is that some people can perceive x-rays coming from other people and that these x-rays tells them intimate secrets about that person. Also that the x-rays emanate as an aura, i.e. the x-rays are coming from somewhere slightly outside the person's skin. Feel free to test that if you have the free time to spend.

Yes, that is indeed the blind logical reading of what he wrote. A brief amount of consideration makes it clear that what he wants is to raise this as a serious thing, and he is even drawing conclusions from that, without being seen to do so.

You do need to produce the radiation because there is too little of it to count naturally. If that were not the case then xrays could be taken without subjecting you to additional radiation from the machine. If you are in a dark room you need to produce light to see even though you have eyes. Same thing.

I am not saying that anything many or even most people believe must be true. I am saying that auras fall in the category of things that I would expect most people to believe in if it is/were a real phenomenon. For that precise reason I would not conclude that auras were real even if you could surprise me by showing that most people believe in them, but I would acknowledge that the argument I am making here would then fail to count against auras.

We now agree on what you are saying. What I've never understood is that if this sort of thing is common and reliable, why is it not a part of normal human understanding? There is nothing controversial in saying that a singer sings and a carpenter works with wood. If there are auras and they can be read to infer facts otherwise hidden, I don't understand why that isn't as completely ordinary as what a carpenter does. On the contrary, even by believers it is presented as a half-magical thing that is fantastical enough to be newsworthy indeed. Getting a handle on auras is not a discovery that belongs at our level of technology - it belongs at the same time we found out that we have eyes and can use them to see. When science came along we stopped believing in many things that were silly, but many beliefs survived the transition. We still believe that singers sing. Yet we don't believe that auras are read, in spite of something like that being very easy to determine if the phenomenon is real and reliable. Certainly it is much easier to prove the existence of than to prove that there is invisible radiation, yet we all accept that the dentist isn't just making stuff up when he shows us an x-ray of our teeth. Even so, we don't believe in auras. Why is that? How could the theory of auras fall into such a state of neglect when even more fantastical things such as x-rays are not doubted? I say it's because there is no such thing as auras - I don't see a better explanation than that.

Yes you are - that is exactly what you are saying. It is just that you don't want to stand by what you are saying; not that I blame you for that.