In the aftermath of the dispiriting comments following last week’s post on the Parapsychological Association, it seems worth spelling out in detail the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc. Which is not to say that we can prove those things aren’t real. We can’t, but that is a completely worthless statement, as science never proves anything; that’s simply not how science works. Rather, it accumulates empirical evidence for or against various hypotheses. If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed.”
The crucial concept here is that, in the modern framework of fundamental physics, not only do we know certain things, but we have a very precise understanding of the limits of our reliable knowledge. We understand, in other words, that while surprises will undoubtedly arise (as scientists, that’s what we all hope for), there are certain classes of experiments that are guaranteed not to give exciting results — essentially because the same or equivalent experiments have already been performed.
A simple example is provided by Newton’s law of gravity, the famous inverse-square law. It’s a pretty successful law of physics, good enough to get astronauts to the Moon and back. But it’s certainly not absolutely true; in fact, we already know that it breaks down, due to corrections from general relativity. Nevertheless, there is a regime in which Newtonian gravity is an effective approximation, good at least to a well-defined accuracy. We can say with confidence that if you are interested in the force due to gravity between two objects separated by a certain distance, with certain masses, Newton’s theory gives the right answer to a certain precision. At large distances and high precisions, the domain of validity is formalized by the Parameterized Post-Newtonian formalism. There is a denumerable set of ways in which the motion of test particles can deviate from Newtonian gravity (as well as from general relativity), and we can tell you what the limits are on each of them. At small distances, the inverse-square behavior of the gravitational force law can certainly break down; but we can tell you exactly the scale above which it will not break down (about a tenth of a millimeter). We can also quantify how well this knowledge extends to different kinds of materials; we know very well that Newton’s law works for ordinary matter, but the precision for dark matter is understandably not nearly as good.
This knowledge has consequences. If we discover a new asteroid headed toward Earth, we can reliably use Newtonian gravity to predict its future orbit. From a rigorous point of view, someone could say “But how do you know that Newtonian gravity works in this particular case? It hasn’t been tested for that specific asteroid!” And that is true, because science never proves anything. But it’s not worth worrying about, and anyone making that suggestion would not be taken seriously.
As with asteroids, so with human beings. We are creatures of the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as everything else. As everyone knows, there are many things we don’t understand about biology and neuroscience, not to mention the ultimate laws of physics. But there are many things that we do understand, and only the most basic features of quantum field theory suffice to definitively rule out the idea that we can influence objects from a distance through the workings of pure thought.
The simplest example is telekinesis, the ability to remotely move an object using only psychic powers. For definitiveness, let’s consider the power of spoon-bending, claimed not only by Uri Geller but by author and climate skeptic Michael Crichton.
What do the laws of physics have to say about spoon-bending? Below the fold, we go through the logic.
- Spoons are made of ordinary matter.
This sounds uncontroversial, but is worth explaining. Spoons are made of atoms, and we know what atoms are made of — electrons bound by photons to an atomic nucleus, which in turn consists of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of quarks held together by gluons. Five species of particles total: up and down quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. That’s it.
There is no room for extra kinds of mysterious particles clinging, aura-like, to the matter in a spoon. That’s because we know how particles behave. If there were some other kind of particle in the spoon, it would have to interact with the ordinary matter we know is there — otherwise it wouldn’t stick, it would just zip right through, as neutrinos zip right through the Earth nearly undisturbed. And if there were a kind of particle that interacted with the ordinary particles in the spoon strongly enough to stick to the spoon, we could easily make it in experiments. The rules of quantum field theory directly relate the interaction rates of particles to the ease with which we can create them in the lab, given enough energy. And we know exactly how much energy is available in a spoon; we know the masses of the atoms, and the kinetic energy of thermal motions within the metal. Taken together, we can say without any fear of making a mistake that any new particles that might exist within a spoon would have been detected in experiments long ago.
Again: imagine you have invented a new kind of particle relevant to the dynamics of spoons. Tell me its mass, and its interactions with ordinary matter. If it’s too heavy or interacts too weakly, it can’t be created or captured. If it is sufficiently light and strongly interacting, it will have been created and captured many times over in experiments we have already done. There is no middle ground. We completely understand the regime of spoons, notwithstanding what you heard in The Matrix.
- Matter interacts through forces.
We’ve known for a long time that the way to move matter is to exert a force on it — Newton’s Law, F=ma, is at least the second most famous equation in physics. In the context of quantum field theory, we know precisely how forces arise: through the exchange of quantum fields. We know that only two kinds of fields exist: bosons and fermions. We know that macroscopic forces only arise from the exchange of bosons, not of fermions; the exclusion principle prohibits fermions from piling up in the same state to create a coherent long-range force field. And, perhaps most importantly, we know what forces can couple to: the properties of the matter fields that constitute an object. These properties include location, mass, spin, and various “charges” such as electric charge or baryon number.
This is where the previous point comes in. Spoons are just a certain arrangement of five kinds of elementary particles — up and down quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons. So if there is going to be a force that moves around a spoon, it’s going to have to couple to those particles. Once you tell me how many electrons etc. there are in the spoon, and the arrangement of their positions and spins, we can say with confidence how any particular kind of force will influence the spoon; no further information is required.
- There are only two long-range forces strong enough to influence macroscopic objects — electromagnetism and gravity.
Of course, we have worked hard to discover different forces in nature, and so far we have identified four: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But the nuclear forces are very short-range, smaller than the diameter of an atom. Gravitation and electromagnetism are the only detectable forces that propagate over longer distances.
Could either gravitation or electromagnetism be responsible for bending spoons? No. In the case of electromagnetism, it would be laughably easy to detect the kind of fields necessary to exert enough force to influence a spoon. Not to mention that the human brain is not constructed to generate or focus such fields. But the real point is that, if it were electromagnetic fields doing the spoon-bending, it would be very very noticeable. (And the focus would be on influencing magnets and circuits, not on bending spoons.)
In the case of gravitation, the fields are just too weak. Gravity accumulates in proportion to the mass of the source, so the arrangement of particles inside your brain will have a much smaller gravitational effect than just the location of your head — and that’s far too feeble to move spoons around. A bowling ball would be more efficient, and most people would agree that moving a bowling ball past a spoon has a negligible effect.
Could there be a new force, as yet undetected by modern science? Of course! I’ve proposed them myself. Physicists are by no means closed-minded about such possibilities; they are very excited by them. But they also take seriously the experimental limits. And those limits show unambiguously that any such new force must either be very short-range (less than a millimeter), or much weaker than gravity, which is an awfully weak force.
The point is that such forces are characterized by three things: their range, their strength, and their source (what they couple to). As discussed above, we know what the possible sources are that are relevant to spoons: quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. So all we have to do is a set of experiments that look for forces between different combinations of those particles. And these experiments have been done! The answer is: any new forces that might be lurking out there are either (far) too short-range to effect everyday objects, or (far) too weak to have readily observable effects.
Here is a plot of the current limits on such forces, from the Eot-Wash group at Julianne’s home institution. This particular plot is for forces that couple to the total number of protons plus neutrons; similar plots exist for other possible sources. The horizontal axis is the range of the force; it ranges from about a millimeter to ten billion kilometers. The vertical axis is the strength of the force, and the region above the colored lines has been excluded by one or more experiments. On meter-sized scales, relevant to bending a spoon with your mind, the strongest possible allowed new force would be about one billionth the strength of gravity. And remember, gravity is far too weak to bend a spoon.
That’s it. We are done. The deep lesson is that, although science doesn’t know everything, it’s not “anything goes,” either. There are well-defined regimes of physical phenomena where we do know how things work, full stop. The place to look for new and surprising phenomena is outside those regimes. You don’t need to set up elaborate double-blind protocols to pass judgment on the abilities of purported psychics. Our knowledge of the laws of physics rules them out. Speculations to the contrary are not the provenance of bold visionaries, they are the dreams of crackpots.
A similar line of reasoning would apply to telepathy or other parapsychological phenomena. It’s a little bit less cut and dried, because in the case of telepathy the influence is supposedly traveling between two human brains, rather than between a brain and a spoon. The argument is exactly the same, but there are those who like to pretend that we don’t understand how the laws of physics work inside a human brain. It’s certainly true that there is much we don’t know about thought and consciousness and neuroscience, but the fact remains that we understand the laws of physics in the brain regime perfectly well. To believe otherwise, you would have to imagine that individual electrons obey different laws of physics because they are located in a human brain, rather than in a block of granite. But if you don’t care about violating the laws of physics in regimes where they have been extensively tested, then anything does in fact go.
Some will argue that parapsychology can be just as legitimately “scientific” as paleontology or cosmology, so long as it follows the methodology of scientific inquiry. But that’s a slightly too know-nothing attitude to quite hold up. If parapsychologists followed the methodology of scientific inquiry, they would look what we know about the laws of physics, realize that their purported subject of study had already been ruled out, and within thirty seconds would declare themselves finished. Anything else is pseudoscience, just as surely as contemporary investigation into astrology, phrenology, or Ptolemaic cosmology. Science is defined by its methods, but it also gets results; and to ignore those results is to violate those methods.
Admittedly, however, it is true that anything is possible, since science never proves anything. It’s certainly possible that the next asteroid that comes along will obey an inverse-cube law of gravity rather than an inverse-square one; we never know for sure, we can only speak in probabilities and likelihoods. Given the above, I would put the probability that some sort of parapsychological phenomenon will turn out to be real at something (substantially) less than a billion to one. We can compare this to the well-established success of particle physics and quantum field theory. The total budget for high-energy physics worldwide is probably a few billion dollars per year. So I would be very happy to support research into parapsychology at the level of a few dollars per year. Heck, I’d even be willing to go as high as twenty dollars per year, just to be safe.
Never let it be said that I am anything other than open-minded.
To Dany,
Of course I am aware of these. But say in the case of relativity, the results of that paper had to be generalized to include gravity, and then with black holes and big bang cosmology this classical gravitation (general relativity) is likely an approximation to a quantum gravity which may require generalizations of both gravity and quantum mechanics. Our physical theories are not something nature obeys, but rather a system of thinking about nature we employ to make sense of nature.
Lawrence B. Crowell
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Lawrence B. Crowell:” But say in the case of relativity, the results of that paper had to be generalized to include gravity”
That is exactly what was done by A.Einstein 10 years later.
Lawrence B. Crowell:” and then with black holes and big bang cosmology this classical gravitation (general relativity) is likely an approximation to a quantum gravity”
No. The Quantum World is not the Classical World. Neither empirical nor theoretical (mathematical) justification of your statements is known to me. What I do know is that in the vicinity of the singularity the dynamics of the system (oscillations) is very similar to ED, namely, the classical and quantum behavior coexists peacefully with each other. Understanding of that is still open problem in the modern ED, but
“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.”
Regards, Dany.
The relationship between the quantum world and the classical world is a matter of research and debate. Yet as a boilerplate we can look at the quantity
$latex
L_p^2~=~Ghbar/c^3
$
and see that this is zero for a number of cases. The first is hbar –>0 which recovers classical mechanics with gravity = general relativity, and for G —> we have special relativity. Another is where c –> infinity and G —> 0 which recovers quantum mechanics. And finally for all of these conditions we have classical mechanics. Finally for L_p > 0 we have quantum gravity.
So I am invoking a rule of thumb that classical mechanics is recovered from QM when the Planck unit of action is zero, or what approximately happens for systems (most systems) with very large actions. Of course there are subtleties here with einselection of quantum states and the “origin” of the classical world. So whether classical mechanics is some categorically separate physics from the quantum world, or whether it is an approximate large scale picture of the world is an open question. It has not been proven either way, and a proof of this would or might demonstrate the truth or falsehood of P = NP for algorithms. The Claymath $1,000,000 award for such a proof is outstanding the last I heard.
With general relativity as a black hole quantum radiates away the classical back reaction model of the BH likely ceases to function, the black hole must be treated quantum mechanically as its horizon and singularity in one way or the other become quantum amplitudes for a superposition of metric configurations.
Lawrence B. Crowell
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Sean,
You may be interested in checking out the following:
http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204045356&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Universe-Scientific-Psychic-Phenomena/dp/0062515020/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204045356&sr=1-2
Lawrence B. Crowell:”It has not been proven either way, and a proof of this would or might demonstrate the truth. The Claymath $1,000,000 award for such a proof is outstanding the last I heard.”
The point of our debate is not how prove is performed (through continuous limit operation or some kind of phase transition) but whether the prove exist (by the way, what you say is the physical jargon and not a math; minimal knowledge and understanding required to distinguish between v-> c and c-> infinity for example. It is explained also by E. Schrödinger in the paper referred above). If instead solving problems you prefer semi-philosophical kishkush, I have nothing against that.
I didn’t identify the difference in your, Sean and my position, but I am not able to understand how from it you arrived to the conclusion that “science never proves anything”. Notice, that it is quite silly to establish money award for the proof that doesn’t exist in principle. In addition, it is already proved empirically that 1M$ one may obtain along much shorter trajectory than the formulation of QG.
Regards, Dany.
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I’ve just written another post 🙂
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Interestingly enough, At an unnamed Huntington AF Base, work was proceeding using a mu metal room and supercooled conductors to read minds of servicemen, about 20-25 years ago. Without fanfare, this system is being used to check security personnel and to promote research into fly-by-thought combat aircraft. I think enough has been published in open literature for this to be considered unclassified. It, at least, should give one to think about the usability of em from the brain for practical usage. Would pilots climb into a respond-to-thought aircraft and sail off into the wild blue yonder without any special training? Ridiculous! however fly-by-thought just may not be that far in the future. AeroSpace magazine is already speculating as to whether this exists in prototype
Nothing is proved by science – the sight of one black swan will disprove thousands of experiences of only seeing white swans. We, being human, will cling to our theories supported by many replications – even in the face of disconfirming evidence.
However, another interesting fact. Near the end of the CIA research into the paranormal, I was involved in performing a meta-analysis of all the published, well controlled, experiments on paranormal effects. (Meta-analysis is analysis of analyses.) None of the research that we looked at came close to p.01 – we found that the positive results outweighed the negative results and the meta analysis found that the probability of finding this number of marginally positive results was p
Lost the less than and more than signs in the preceding post. “None of the research that we looked at came close to p less than .01. …The probability of finding this number of marginally positive results was p less than .001.
I don’t know where to start, but I need to start somewhere, thus would you take the time to read this? My name is Steven Turner, and I am a physicist in my own right. I started writing about psychology when I was thirteen years old and continued until I was twenty-two. I had not had a teacher of this, so I did all my examinations alone. When I was about twenty-three, my mind began changing focus towards the way our universe works. Again having no teacher, I had to figure it out alone. I wanted to determine how our atom works. I began testing personal theories about simple mathematical codes that the universe could use. Instead of trying to actually see what was going on in an atom, I tried to establish the only possible code that an atom could operate with. This seemed easier for I had no access to a collider, which I had no idea even existed at the time. I spent roughly three years figuring out a code that worked easily, simply, and well. Once I got this done, I signed up for a few classes at a college in order to slightly test my theories. I took a simple algebra class and a psychology class. I tried to show the math teacher some of my work, but not only did he seem to look at me as lesser than him, but he also seemed completely uninterested with my years of work. I suppose I really cant expect more from a teacher that’s just wants to teach his class, and pass no judgment, but I attained multitudes of universal information during attendance of the class. During my psychology class, it was as if I were at home, seeing things I had never noticed before. Within a few classes I noticed that the makeup of the mind was tightly comparable to the composure of the atom. I began connecting the known knowledge of psychology, with my theories of what I now call atomics, or universal mathematics. Soon I had begun creating something I would like to introduce to the world of science, as ((Psychological Atomics)). I believe I can explain how our minds follow the exact nature of atomic signatures, signals, transfers, disturbances, equations, and much more. I may not be a professional in the eyes of acknowledged world scientists, but I do have a great deal of heart for this. I believe that the universe is so simple that it may be easy to decipher its mechanisms by comparing everything we see around us. Mathematics is universal and associates with every natural world existence. Instead of just breaking the atom down I went straight for what I like to call the ((Bottom)). After briefly reading into some reports, I found that many call the bottom, the ((God particle)). I am trying to crack the atom code in a mobile home, within a small town of Arizona. I CAN DO IT!! All I need is a little time with professionals that I don’t know how to get in touch with. I have put atomics into algebraic and geometric formats and although I don’t have this code complete, I think I am closer than I should be. I can easily explain why light travels faster than sound, and why we don’t age while traveling at the speed of light. Time measurement is easy to define and calculate with this theory. I can make it complex enough to evade many, or easy enough for a grade school student to understand. I have over five hundred pages of journalism and diagrams to share with the scientific world, and whether or not it can ever be taken seriously, I would like to share it with someone. I am also timid to share it, in possibility that it will be stolen, but we all deserve and share the same knowledge together do we not? It doesn’t matter who figures these things out, it only matters that we do. I believe that I have a good idea of what happened seven steps before the Big Bang. This is all I am comfortable sharing at this point.
Thank you,
Your fellow physicist
Monkeyrun26@hotmail.com
And yet we cannot explain without “mystical forces” why the universe expands faster than it should, or why there is more matter in the universe than we can see. Thus the scientific community comes up with such exotic creations as “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter” to fill that void.
Yet have we been able to actually detect Dark Energy directly? Or Dark Matter? What proof, outside of its “footprint” on the mundane universe, provides evidence of its existence? These exotics have been formulated to explain for discrepencies in physics to make the “laws of physics” work.
If we do not yet have instrumentation to directly detect Dark Energy and Dark Matter, if our physics models are so inaccurate that we need to formulate exotics to explain discrepencies, then how can we so blithely dismiss the possibility of some form of energy manipulation that people might regard as parapsychology?
There are no laws of physics that explain phenomena such as ghosts or spiritual entities. Yet there are numerous sightings… and paraprofessionals working with the available tools have captured footage that strongly suggests that there is something else out there. There are no laws of physics that allow for God or the soul. Yet human belief of these things is so powerful that for nearly as long as mankind has been sentient… we have perceived of the Divine.
Blind devotion to science is as dangerous as blind devotion to religion. Once humanity creates a Grand Theory of Everything that actually works and is proven… and if that Grand Theory disallows for things beyond our ken such as paraphysics or the Divine… then I’ll put aside my curiosity of such things. Until then, for all my love of science I will still believe there is more out there than that we perceive.
Rob H.
“our belief that the Schroedinger equation determines all of the properties of a many-body system is just a faith” footnote 7, p 2 in Quantum Field Theory of Many-Body Systems by Xiao-Gang Wen.
We do NOT ‘..know that macroscopic forces only arise from the exchange of bosons…’
We only KNOW that macroscopic forces can be illustrated by the exchange of bosons.
Quantum theory was a stop gap measure for the failings of GRT. The real physics has not yet been determined.
‘Science never proves anything’ – This is true.
Guy Grantham, the evidence against telekinesis as presented by Prosecutor Sean is much more solid than the evidence that is used to put people behind bars.
I loved the post. I’m reading a book, “Schrodinger’s Kittens and the search for reality by John Gribbin”. My only question is regarding the effect that probability has on light, in relation to events which are rather rare. As I’m sure you already know. Feynman hinted that light doesn’t reflect at only one angle to a reflective surface, we see this when we tilt a CD against a light source ( there is a even a neat change in the spectrum the farther you tilt it!). The thought that light has such an interesting property, similar to that seen in the double-slit experiment, begs the question as to what role probability may play in determining the source of “spooky” phenomenon to that which this post is intended. Its very funny you should mention electricity and magnetism as well. I was blown away by the existence of “advanced” waves. Waves that travel back through time. The physics is hard to grasp. In fact I’m only just reading about it, I have no idea what it looks like mathematically, but it really does beg the question whether or not probabilistic approaches could approach the true source of such events.
Hello peoples, theres some great reading here.
I have a certain interest in this topic &
im by no means a professional or get paid to research
Of course anyone who believes this subject is fraud would have not experienced
But,
What about you people who DO believe it “could” be possible..
Is this just a hunch..?
Or
Is it because you “KNOW”
Hehe I like andy.s’s alter ego, is he around?
The hard part isn’t moving matter..
But,
removing your ego once you become an adult..
Ego = block
This is why experiments fail on this subject..
People can ONLY do it for themselves..
When one chooses to do so..
Not to impress others..
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I very much like your scientific explanation on this subject matter, BUT!
The fact is, that modern science understands only a tiny fraction of the physical reality, that again, just as well depends to the eyes of the beholder.
Yes, it is true that we have established mathematical equations that explain how
certain natural phenomena, like gravity, function. BUT again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What gravity is?
Why it acts on matter, the way it does?
What force is, and where it comes from?
Well, we truly don’t know!
Trough observation, we witness a specific observable fact, and we assign values
to it (human based numbers, as an exmpl.), and according to that we understand
how it works. We can use those formulas to predict, or even manipulate certain
physical properties, while not truly knowing their origin.
So, just because you were able to reason in a logical manner, with the help of scientific facts, doesn’t prove anything. Who is to say, that even thought we
live in a world, that depends on laws on physics to function, those laws can’t be manipulated? Like a great hacker, who has a full understanding of how a computer program works, even if he didn’t create it, can manipulate the program to have his desired outcome. A human being might have applied the same concept to our physical reality, provided the fact that he/she had a full understanding on how it all works. We have proven so far, that yesterday’s fiction is today’s reality. So, we can predict that today’s fiction will be tomorrow’s reality.
All those stories about “Magic”, scientist like to laugh about, make more sense in my mind, than a complete logical approach.
Keep in mind that logic is important, but things that are not logical still are building
blocks of our reality, and are as well important. Even more so, because until we turn those magical things into logic, Logic in general will remain illogical.
One question: Is consciousness a developed trait?
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