Psychic phenomena, secret experiments and troubled supergeniuses...

POSTED BY: eviltobz
UPDATED: Thursday, February 24, 2005 07:35
VIEWED: 4141
PAGE 1 of 1

EVILTOBZ

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 12:24 PM

Just been reading a scientific news article which has implications that some of River's abilities may have a firm, if somewhat unknown, base in science. Seems like it might be of intereest to you guys.

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121

---------------------------------------------
eviltobz - that's lowercase gorram it!

CYBERSNARK

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 3:30 PM

Page won't load for me. Methinks someone got to them first. . .

-----
We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.

EMBERS

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 4:07 PM

curse those blue hands operatives!

EVILTOBZ

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 4:59 PM

hmmmm, still loads okay from here, i'll paste it in instead. bit of a long one, but here we go...

DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.

At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.

But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.

The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.

Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.

'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.

'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.

And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.

Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.

'Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough,' says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. 'But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means.' The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available.

One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip mor

DTUCK

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 7:04 PM

Holy damn.

Not sure what to say about that. I know that the quantum number generation is all random, but I also know that on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I woke up with a terrible sense of dread, the likes of which I'd never felt before.

Whether there's a correlation between my feeling and how (or even whether) it could affect the number generator, I don't know.

__________________________________

The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. - Oscar Wilde

REEQUEEN

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 7:44 PM

Wow. And the launchpad for a thousand new sci-fi premises was born.....

"He has a gorm horizon. All gorm that falls past it is lost forever." UserFriendly http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050114

DTUCK

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 8:10 PM

Tell me about it...

"Mr. President, at 0350 hours, the Random Event Generator peaked at 93% non-randomality. We've already got the precog's working on it, but we don't know how long it will be until the event occurs... all we know is... it's going to be big..."

__________________________________

The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. - Oscar Wilde

REEQUEEN

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 8:28 PM

Which pretty much explains Minority Report, anyway.

And here I was, researching quantum physics and dark matter....silly, silly, me.

"He has a gorm horizon. All gorm that falls past it is lost forever." UserFriendly http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050114

DTUCK

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:24 PM

Well, you could continue with your research, but it all points to the same thing pretty much... the equation balancing itself out. Interestingly enough, even wildly conservative estimates put the amount of dark matter in the universe at billions of times the amount of normal matter. Though the way it interacts with normal matter proves that its mass is much much less, so perhaps, mass-wise, it all equals out. Lots more dark matter at less mass = less normal matter at higher mass.

Then there's the question of Nemesis... but I'm still speculative on that issue.

__________________________________

The best way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. - Oscar Wilde

REEQUEEN

Tuesday, February 22, 2005 11:05 PM

Too late! I've already deleted my text!

Just kidding. I worked all last week on it, and ain't givin' up now.

As far as I can tell, there's two basic kinds of dark matter - MACHO and WIMP - the first having great mass, the second having almost no mass whatsoever. Which kinda works out for what I was trying to do (and this is writing stuff, not some basement experiment to mess with space and time, although that could be interesting).

It's been too many years since my high school and college physics courses, and I'm regretting that I didn't keep up with it. Fascinating stuff, really changes the world. Heh, heh, I said "changes the world," heh....[/reference to plotting device]

"He has a gorm horizon. All gorm that falls past it is lost forever." UserFriendly http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050114

SIMONWHO

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 1:39 AM

I think the people behind that device really stretch things. For example - Oprah visits Africa is a major world event (and hence reflected in the numbers). The March 11th bombings in Madrid weren't.

They also stretch things according to how they want them to be: some are days ahead, some are hours ahead, some simultaneous, some hours behind, some days behind.

I hope they've all got tenure.

REEQUEEN

Wednesday, February 23, 2005 2:27 AM

Well, yeah, I think I pretty much assumed that. I tend to assume that a lot of stuff gets skewed to reflect what the people involved in whatever want it to reflect.

But it's still interesting, and entirely useful as a trope, if (as I suspect) nothing much else.

"He has a gorm horizon. All gorm that falls past it is lost forever." UserFriendly http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20050114

FINN MAC CUMHAL

Thursday, February 24, 2005 6:24 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by eviltobz:
The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.

Hmmm. Sounds a little like a random walk scenario. So where’s the control case? It’s a little difficult to understand how this could yield results. A purely random walk will not necessarily produce a flat or nearly flat line, even for large runs. So I have a hard time understanding what the baseline is. Of course this article probably doesn’t explain the experiment well, but I still don’t know what they could possibly be comparing this to in order to know that they aren’t getting just a random walk.

Call me Skully, but this sounds to me like computer age tea leaves.

Quote:
Originally posted by ReeQueen:
Wow. And the launchpad for a thousand new sci-fi premises was born.....

Asimov already beat them to it.

ELWOODMOM

Thursday, February 24, 2005 7:35 AM

Interesting article.

I'm a bit psychic myself. I can always tell when the phone will ring, because it's always happens when I'm in the bathroom!