Kirlian photography and the ficus experiment

Almost every home has a ficus standing somewhere on a windowsill. It is an unassuming houseplant that you water once a week, wipe the dust off now and then, and otherwise barely notice. An ordinary ficus just like that became the main character of an experiment the manufacturer Tachyon published to show how it sees the influence of tachyonized materials on living organisms.

Two photographs, ten minutes apart

The experiment is simple. First, a Kirlian photograph was taken of a leaf from a ficus growing in a pot. Then a tachyonized silica disk was stuck to the bottom of the pot, and ten minutes later the leaf was photographed again. In the second picture the glow around the leaf is noticeably larger and brighter.

Tachyon says the ficus was no exception. Of all the living plants tested and photographed during the research, it apparently represents the average effect observed. According to the manufacturer, the overall energy field of the potted plants grew after exposure to tachyon energy, and it attributes the difference between picture no. 1 and picture no. 2 to the disk under the pot. Another observation from the same photographic research is interesting too: plants growing in soil needed much less time to change than cut plants or fruit. The manufacturer concludes from this that something similar applies to people, since we are living organisms as well.

The original article on this site was headed "Tachyon raises the energy of all living organisms" and drew on the research section of the manufacturer's official website.

Semyon Kirlian and his discovery

For the photographs to make sense, we need to go back to 1939. That year the Russian electrical engineer Semyon Kirlian noticed, by chance, that when a high-voltage electric field acts on an object placed on a photographic plate, an image appears on the plate. A coloured fringe forms around the object, reminiscent of a halo or of the corona discharge you can sometimes see around high-voltage power lines on a damp night.

Since then, two stories have been told about these pictures. In one, the glow is a physical image of a spiritual aura or "life force" which, in this view, surrounds every living being. Physicists, for their part, describe the glow as an electrical discharge in the air between the object and the plate. According to laboratory measurements from the 1970s, its size and colour depend mainly on how moist the object is, but also on the pressure, the voltage, the temperature and the length of the exposure. So anyone comparing two pictures should keep these conditions as similar as possible, much as you would weigh yourself on the same scales at the same time of day if you wanted a fair comparison.

An experiment you can do at home

Most of us don't have a Kirlian apparatus at home, since it works with high voltage and belongs in the hands of people with experience. You can, however, carry out the plant observation yourself, it just takes longer.

Get two identical young plants, ideally from the same batch at a garden centre, so they have a similar start. Plant them in the same compost and the same pots, and stand them side by side so they get the same light and temperature. Stick a silica disk 7.5 cm under one pot and leave the other without one. Water them on the same day with the same amount of water. Once a week, photograph both from the same spot in the same light, and note down their height and the number of new leaves.

If you want to go a step further, ask someone in your family to label the pots with letters at the start and not tell you which one has the disk. After a month or two you will have your own diary, and you can compare it with what the manufacturer describes.

How to clean and store the disk after the experiment is explained in the guide Caring for silica disks. What tachyonization does to a material according to David Wagner is described in the article Tachyonization, and we write about the energy fields of living beings in the article What we know about tachyon energy, part 2.

Sources

• Advanced Tachyon Technologies: Ficus Kirlian Photo Study, research section of the manufacturer's official website.
• Robert T. Carroll: The Skeptic's Dictionary, entry Kirlian photography.
• E. Pehek, H. Kyler, D. Faust: Image Modulation in Corona Discharge Photography, Science 194 (1976).