Man, I am amazed that this story is still out there but it looks like as recently as last year, someone had to publish an explanation for the milk-drinking statues in India.
I'm hoping we're beyond this but it looks like there may be some low-hanging fruit out there...
So... milk-drinking statues.
This first happened back in 1995. Worshippers in temples in India found that when they put spoonfuls of milk up to the statues of their gods, the milk would disappear. This caused a mass hysteria and hindus all over the world rushed to their temples to inundate their statues with milk. There were reports of statues drinking 'litres of milk.'
Randi and many others debunked this back when it first came out:
What's really happening is that teaspoons of milk are beingabsorbed; it's called capillary action. A small amount ofmilk touched to the mouth of a plaster figure, according tothe press, just "disappeared." I think not. The milk didn't"disappear"; it was simply soaked up by the plaster.
Unfortunately, 'Plaster soaks up Milk' doesn't make for as good a headline so the media went nuts about this. In August of 2006, it appears this little bit of mass delusion happened again. Once again, it was called a 'miracle' although the articles this time at least had a sentence or two about how scientists explain it.
This may seem like a harmless exercise in futility but when it happened in 95, it actually caused milk shortages across India. According to the article:
"... authorities were forced to deploy extra police to control crowds and some parts of the country even faced a milk shortage..."
In a country as overpopulated as India, it's pretty criminal to waste milk on statues.
The next time this happens, I think we need to try to apply some scientific testing to this. Why just Hindu statues? Would it work on statues in Catholic churches? Or is Jesus lactose intolerant? "Yea, for it upsets His Eternal belly..."
Monday, January 22, 2007
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I am a rationalist by nature, have a scientific education (BSc and MSc) and am not one to believe in things through blind faith. I've been brought up in a far from religious Hindu family in the UK. When the 1995 "miracle" was first reported on BBC news, my grandma decided to try and feed milk to her 3" bronze statue of Ganesh (which had been in the home for many years). To her amazement the statue started to soak up the milk and continued to do so for the following 5 days, drinking far in excess of the volume of the statue, being fed by different members of the family and family friends, many of who were not religious. The statue was sat on a small steel tray. By the end of the 5 days there was a small pool of milk in the tray, where there had been some spillage, no more than 30 ml in total, compared to the pints and pints of milk the statue had drunk. After the 5th day, the statue stopped drinking and didn't do so again, even though several attempts were made to feed it in the following weeks. I have no idea why or how this happened. The capillary action explanation does not explain how any bronze object can soak up a liquid far in excess of its volume, or why the drinking stopped all of sudden without any dramatic changes in temperature or environment (it was a comfortable room temperature throughout). It also doesn't explain why the same event was reported all over the world at the same time or why statues made of very different materials were exhibiting the same behaviour. BTW I was not part of any mass hysteria, I was surrounded by several initially sceptical but equally dumbfounded family members!
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