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Jan. 17th, 2008
Stranger than we can imagine
Jan. 17th, 2008 03:19 pmI've been reading George Hansen's Trickster and the Paranormal since late last year and I'm closing in on the end. It's dense, scholarly, meticulously footnoted, but chock full of interesting things. In the passage I just finished reading Hansen was talking about a phenomena observed in parapsychology labs in the 70s: retroactive psychokinesis. Psychokinesis (PK for short), if you don't know, is the ability to move objects or make physical effects occur just by concentrating one's mind upon them.
Helmut Schmidt, a well-known researcher, used electronic random number generators (RNG for short) to generate (randomly!) clicking noises which were fed into headphones of subjects being tested for PK ability. Their task was to see if they could speed up the rate at which the clicking noises occured. A statistically significant number of the subjects were able to do this. So Schmidt tried another variant on this experiment: he had the RNG generate another run of clicking noises only this time he taped them on magnetic tape. As a double blind and control, he re-recorded them onto paper tape. Then he hooked more subjects up to the headphones and gave them the same task, to increase the rate of clicks, not telling them that the clicks were pre-recorded. The test runs of pre-recorded clicks had significantly more clicks than the controls, as if the PK had reached back in time to change what once had been.
But in science it's not a valid finding unless other researchers are able to replicate the experiment with the same or similar results, right?
And that's just what happened. Different researchers in different parts of the world, using other methods of randomly generated clicks and more stringent controls, replicated this research at least four different times. I might add that all these experiments were fairly rigorously controlled.
I'm not sure I buy that the PK is traveling back in time, but I haven't got a satisfactory explanation for what's happening here—not in the usual cause and effect sense. This experiment, and others like it, lapse into some loopy land of quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the well-known experimenter effect (wherein the expectations of the experimenter can effect even rigorously controlled experiments), and Lawd knows what else.
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
—Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 - 1944)
Damn straight, Artie.
Now, if I could only find a way to use PK to clean my house...
Helmut Schmidt, a well-known researcher, used electronic random number generators (RNG for short) to generate (randomly!) clicking noises which were fed into headphones of subjects being tested for PK ability. Their task was to see if they could speed up the rate at which the clicking noises occured. A statistically significant number of the subjects were able to do this. So Schmidt tried another variant on this experiment: he had the RNG generate another run of clicking noises only this time he taped them on magnetic tape. As a double blind and control, he re-recorded them onto paper tape. Then he hooked more subjects up to the headphones and gave them the same task, to increase the rate of clicks, not telling them that the clicks were pre-recorded. The test runs of pre-recorded clicks had significantly more clicks than the controls, as if the PK had reached back in time to change what once had been.
But in science it's not a valid finding unless other researchers are able to replicate the experiment with the same or similar results, right?
And that's just what happened. Different researchers in different parts of the world, using other methods of randomly generated clicks and more stringent controls, replicated this research at least four different times. I might add that all these experiments were fairly rigorously controlled.
I'm not sure I buy that the PK is traveling back in time, but I haven't got a satisfactory explanation for what's happening here—not in the usual cause and effect sense. This experiment, and others like it, lapse into some loopy land of quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the well-known experimenter effect (wherein the expectations of the experimenter can effect even rigorously controlled experiments), and Lawd knows what else.
"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
—Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 - 1944)
Damn straight, Artie.
Now, if I could only find a way to use PK to clean my house...
Labors under the sun
Jan. 17th, 2008 03:54 pmRandomly generated quote of the day:
"The work is not upon us to complete, yet neither are we free to desist from it."
—Rabbi Hillel
(Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala.)
( Illustrative version. )
"The work is not upon us to complete, yet neither are we free to desist from it."
—Rabbi Hillel
(Thanks to
matociquala.)( Illustrative version. )