Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science - My Sehir

More documents

Recommendations

Info

136 CHAPTER EIGHTHarold Puttoff and Russell Targ, at the Stanford Research Institutewith a simple parlor trick in which he appeared to bendspoons with the power of his mind. Brian De Palma’s 1976film Carrie, about an angry teenage girl’s psychokinetic rampage,was a huge box-office success. There was even a televisiongame show on NBC called Blank Check that was supposed toreward contestants for their ESP powers. It folded after only acouple of episodes because none of the contestants, all of whomimagined themselves as having great psychic power, could outperforma coin toss.Because Helmut Schmidt’s random-number-generator experimentsin Durham had all the trappings of a serious scientificstudy, they were taken seriously by people who probably shouldhave known better.MIND GAMESThere was, however, a far more serious side to the ESP fad ofthe 1970s. Fifteen hundred miles away from Durham at theLos Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, those responsiblefor ensuring the safety of America’s vast stockpile ofnuclear bombs held urgent top-secret meetings to discussSchmidt’s findings. Engineers calculated the force that wouldbe needed, and the distance over which it would have to operate,to set off a nuclear bomb. Considering the consequences,the amount of energy it would take to trigger a warhead seemedfrighteningly small. In the design of nuclear weapons the emphasishad been on ensuring that there was no way to applysuch a force externally, but could the mind reach inside thebomb?Two hundred and fifty thousand miles away on the Moon,astronaut Edgar Mitchell, excited by Schmidt’s results, conductedprivate ESP experiments with friends on Earth. The experimentsconsisted of Mitchell concentrating on one of fivedifferent cards and his psychic friends back on Earth trying to
SCHRÖDINGER’S GRAVE 137tell which one. The result according to Mitchell was that ESPworked about as well across 250,000 miles of empty space asit does with someone in the same room. Actually, I’m preparedto believe it would work exactly as well. Believers take this asevidence of “quantum non-locality.”Three hundred and eighty miles away at Princeton University,a student proposed, as her undergraduate thesis project,building a random number generator similar to Schmidt’s forthe study of psychokinesis. She asked Robert Jahn, by thendean of the engineering school, if he would supervise her project.It would become his life’s work.PEARIn 1979 Robert Jahn announced the formation of the PrincetonEngineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab. The first projectof the new lab would be to replicate Schmidt’s random-numbergeneratorexperiments. In the years that followed, the PEARlab would find a small positive result in millions of trials usinga wide variety of random devices.There were “random-walk” machines, battery operated toysthat randomly changed direction. The subject would mentallyurge the random-walk machine to go in a particular direction.Although the path taken by the machine might appear randomto an observer, the automated machinery that tracked the devicealways seemed to compute with great certainty that themotion of the device had been influenced by the thoughts ofthe subject.There were experiments with water fountains, in which waterdroplets are randomly generated by the fluid stream. The subjectwould urge the fountain to kick a drop ever higher. Again,the automated analysis would somehow calculate astronomicalodds against the outcome being mere chance.Was fraud involved? It can’t be ruled out. Most of thePEAR trials were conducted by the staff. Life is better in any
Page 3: SCHRÖDINGER’S GRAVE 131technolog
Page 6 and 7: 134 CHAPTER EIGHTRhonda Bryne’s T
Page 10 and 11: 138 CHAPTER EIGHTorganization if th
Page 12 and 13: 140 CHAPTER EIGHTanomalous behavior

Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science - My Sehir

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?