However, as soon as one calls himself a scientist, he must realize the limits of his own usefulness to humanity. Scientists help us live in the here and now by helping the common man to live more effectively within the rules that we currently understand.

The inevitable outcome, however, is that the laws defined by that scientist will not stand the test of time. Years from now, another scientist will prove to the world how misguided you were. And he (or she) will excuse your ignorance, saying “how could he have known any better at the time?”

Years from that, another scientist will do the same to discredit the one who discredited you. And so the cycle will continue, until new possibilities emerge and the universe looks like a drastically different place than the one we can imagine, from our current context.

I appreciate the opinion of any scientist who realizes that although he may feel certain of his correctness today, there will likely come a time when his life’s work will be proven irrelevant to the new context.

Scientists who become too certain of themselves become an example of how a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. A little bit of knowledge about particles and forces (compared to what will exist in a future context) will simply be limiting to the rest of the population. Scientific opinions must always end with “but anything is possible.”

Although the opinion of one brilliant man or woman is valuable to us, I think it is much less useful than watching a trend. It is very easy for one person to be completely wrong about something. However, if a concept such as telepathy appears in human culture, is scrutinized by generation after generation, and becomes an idea that will not go away, then I find it likely that it does exist and we simply do not understand it yet.

If time and the application of science cannot make a concept go away, then there is something that we are missing.

p.s: no one said TK was magic…

Is it possible that while those physicists were working on the atomic bomb that other physicists had no clue that this existed as it was military? Maybe there IS available, justifiable and data rich information available on things like ESP but it is in the military vaults where such abilities would surely be best used and data readily available due to National and International security.

As far as I am concerned anything is possible, the more improbable it is the more it adds fuel to the progression of Quantum Physics. To stifle Quantum Physics with data that is available and is subject to formulae is like telling an artist to paint with numbers. Open your mind further! Many serious physicists believe in a creator or composer of the universe and we are just dancing on the edge that is the true microscopic.

Every study towards these paranormal claims has been vulnerable to an effect known as the Rosenthal Effect or Experimenter expectancy effect.

This is an effect where an experimenter can communicate a hypothesis to a subject via body language and tone of voice without saying anything outright, and hence influence the performance of the human subjects you are trying to test. This issue is actually a problem not only with testing paranormal claims, but is in fact quite rampant in behavioural research, psychology, and certain areas of medicine. (Fortunately in medicine, they’ve managed to negate this effect fairly well.) Further information can be found on this in “Experimenter Effects in Behavioural Research” by Robert Rosenthal, published 1976.

In the cases of parapsychology AND anomalistic psychology (the skeptical study of these supposedly paranormal phenomena) skeptics and proponents of these claims have directly interacted with the subjects. An addendum written by Julie Milton for the Milton and Wiseman 1999 meta-analysis of the Ganzfeld studies pointed out that the “Sheep-Goat” effect pointed out that skeptics might inadvertently block out data coming in from weak sensory leakage, making it harder to detect. As skepticism and belief can be communicated to the subject through body language, until the experimenter expectancy effect is controlled for,
we can’t really tackle the lack of replication in parapsychology, and on top of that, determine, whether or not every study had some sort of flaw in it, or whether or there actually is a paranormal effect. As James Alcock said in his editorial “Give the Null Hypothesis a Chance”:

“The problem for parapsychology, however, is that the difficulty in replication means that it may not be possible to get the same results a second time, whether the methodology is
cleaned up or not.”

The only effective way then to properly control for this is skeptic/proponent collaboration on experiments (already started, with the previous Schlitz/Wiseman collaborations on psychic staring, and the current French and Sheldrake collaborations on telephone telepathy) to remove every flaw possible, and use an experimental assistant who is both blind to the hypothesis and target material and neutral in their beliefs towards the existence or lack thereof of psychic abilities, so as to control for the experimenter expectancy effect and avoid influencing whether or not the subject interprets any possible data coming in, be it from a methodological flaw, or (highly unlikely) a psychic source.

Now, that that’s dealt with, the second thing I wanted to deal with is a question pertaining to the force of gravity. Since we’re dealing with paranormal claims, rather than spending a ton of money on testing for paranormal claims, we should look at whether or not the laws of physics actually allow for these types of claims. You’ve already shown a very convincing argument that they haven’t. However, there is one question I have, and this is in relation to the force of gravity itself. I came across a paper recently by one Heinrich Pas entitled “Closed timelike curves in asymmetrically warped brane universes” (http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603045) which was referenced in New Scientist (http://science-junkie.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/41510/) and was described as demonstrating that there might be certain warps of higher dimensional bulk, or solutions of M theory, in which gravitons and sterile neutrinos could exit our three dimensional physical universe, and by traveling through these shortcuts, appear to travel backwards in time or faster than light when they reentered our universe. Apparently, the MiniBoone experiment has already found some evidence for the existence of sterile neutrinos and such higher dimensional shortcuts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniBooNE). My question is, would such higher dimensional shortcuts allow for causality violation, or meaningful information or gravitational fields to be sent FTL or over sufficient distances that they wouldn’t weaken as they otherwise would according to the inverse square law? If they do, then might it behoove us to put in the relevant controls necessary, and do one proper serious look at parapsychology, and then be done with it once and for all? An easy test I can think of to test for telekinesis, at least of the random number generator variety, is to run a well controlled RNG experiment, while having the subject sit on a properly calibrated scale (properly calibrated to take into account ideomotor shifts and things like that). If the subject loses mass, and a statistically significant effect is found and all other normal explanations have been removed, and the loss in mass could be correlated to the significant effect found with the RNG, an argument could be made that the subject sent gravitons, or part of their gravitational field, to where the RNG was at certain times, influencing the radioactive decay rate by time dilation, and by doing so, they would no longer be attracted to the earth as strongly, hence their drop in mass.

Anyway, I guess the bit I was hoping for an answer back from you about Sean was the bit about the higher order dimensional models described. Are they consistent with the known laws of physics, and if so, do they allow for causality violation or meaningful information to be transmitted backwards through time or FTL? If so, it might provide a basis within the laws of physics for psi phenomena (something I hope isn’t the case) which is testable. Anyway, just my thoughts on the subject.

In conclusion, I am currently skeptical of psychic powers and all other paranormal phenomena, because of my current understanding of the laws of physics and Occham’s Razor. Nonetheless, there hasn’t been any well controlled study into these supposed claims, and I’m curious if M theory allows for causality violations which provide a basis within the laws of physics for ESP and PK. If so, I’d like to see it tested rigorously to get the issue dealt with once and for all so we can move on to more important things.