Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science - My Sehir

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134 CHAPTER EIGHTRhonda Bryne’s The Secret would become a runaway bestseller.To the question, “How can that be?” the standard answer became“quantum mechanics.”COLLAPSING REALITYMany scientists seemed to enjoy their status as ordained quantumpriests presiding over mysterious rituals in a strange language,rather like conducting mass in Latin. To strip away someof the vestments and see what’s underneath, let’s do a simplethought experiment.We put a white ball and a black ball in separate but identicalboxes. The boxes are then shuffled; I put one in my pocket andyou take the other. We then climb into our respective spaceshipsand leave Earth headed in opposite directions. I have noway of knowing whether my box contains the white ball or theblack ball. In the language of quantum mechanics, a wavefunction for the white ball is half in my box and half in yourson the other side of the galaxy. The same is true of the wavefunction of the black ball. If I don’t peek, there is only a “potential”ball inside the box.Some day, when my curiosity gets the best of me, I will openmy box. Perhaps I will find a white ball inside. In quantumspeak,the act of making the observation would be said to havecreated the white ball by “collapsing” the white ball’s wavefunction—including the 50% in your box halfway across thegalaxy. Had information traveled superluminally (faster thanlight) through a universal consciousness field?I can’t prove it’s not so—in the language of philosophers, it’snot falsifiable—but it doesn’t seem to be a very useful concept.RANDOM EVENTS?One of those who thought quantum mechanics implied somesort of universal consciousness was Robert Jahn at Princeton,
SCHRÖDINGER’S GRAVE 135and he firmly believed it to be the responsibility of scientists tofind out. If true, it would profoundly alter our understandingof reality.Another who thought so was German-born physicist andparapsychologist Helmut Schmidt at the Rhine Research Center’sInstitute for Parapsychology in Durham, North Carolina.Schmidt initiated research into the effects of human consciousnesson machines called random number generators (RNGs) inthe 1970s. A random number generator can be thought of as adevice that flips a coin for you over and over, keeping track ofthe heads and tails. RNGs have found use as controls in manyexperiments involving statistical analysis.Actually flipping a coin enough times to get good statisticswould be rather time consuming. Schmidt’s device, however,was electronic, switching randomly between a red and a greenlight. RNGs normally do this by triggering on “white” electricalnoise. “White noise” literally means the spectrum is of equalintensity at every frequency. Any noise spike above a presetlevel would switch the color of light. Familiar sources of whitenoise are the hiss from a radio that is not tuned to a stationand the sound of rushing water. A subject would attempt toinfluence with his mind which color was lit more often.Whether you can actually make a machine that is truly randomis disputed by some experts, but even if that’s so, Schmidtfelt he could control for it by having his subjects alternatebetween periods of thinking green and thinking red. The electronicRNG allowed Schmidt to accumulate statistically significantresults relatively quickly.In hundreds of trials, Schmidt reported success rates of 1%to 2% above what would be expected if the RNG was not influencedby the subject’s thoughts. One extra “heads” out of ahundred coin tosses may not sound like much, but if the mindof the subject was exerting any influence, however small, itwould be a revolutionary discovery—if it was real.Psychokinesis, or “telekinesis” as it was generally called inthe 1970s, captured the public imagination. You will recall fromchapter 3 that Israeli psychic Uri Geller baffled two physicists,
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Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science - My Sehir

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