Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory

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.

Whoa 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.

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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.

172 Comments

172 thoughts on “Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory”

  1. Pingback: Uri Geller and Sean Carroll: two visionaries of the occult at Freedom of Science

  2. Admittedly, I have not read the book, and based on the descriptions that I’ve read online, I have no real intention to – in my belief system, someone who claims to have supernatural powers cannot be trusted on other matters of science. However, one thing important here is your comment:

    ou act as though somebody [who] is not a confirmed scientist that reports on their own experiences (such as having tests done, looking at the results with a trained doctor, coming to a conclusion, and then relaying it to others) is not as credible as the doctor’s report itself.

    Yes, that’s exactly how I act, because it’s true. The doctor’s report would be far more direct evidence than the relaying of that doctor’s report. The relayed story is not nearly as credible, because there are many more opportunities for mistakes, misinterpretations, omissions, or direct fraud to occur.

  3. True, eh. Again, language is everything. Perhaps a report would be more direct evidence, but only evidence of a particular kind if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it all. I just read that it is suspected that at least 20% of all doctor’s determinations for patients are false or incorrect in regards to what they describe as being true. Now, I’m not saying a person should not trust the opinion of a person who has dedicated a large amount of time to a particular field of study, but I do think that what we, as a society, term “credible” is only based on some sort of ambiguous agreement as to what counts as proof. On top of that, even if I was citing a direct report, I’m sure questions would be flying about the validity of the study and psychological “experiments” in general. Anyhoo, claiming that one can alter there own biochemistry seems to me, as a chemist, not all that too far fetched. But yeah, truth is such an arbitrary term in matters of science that I don’t think it really helps an argument any by claiming that such and such is true.

  4. Just bend the spoon with your damn fingers and tell everybody you’re a psychic. It’s a whole lot simpler than looking for loopholes in physics. Scientists, accustomed to an adversary who is “subtle but not malicious,” all too often fail to appreciate what a canny fellow can do with a child’s book of parlor tricks.

  5. Ironically enough, I had a rather lengthy discussion with someone this morning on the reality of quantum teleportation. He couldn’t fathom how it could be possible (no knowledge of quantum physics) and was fairly certain that the stories of the successful teleportation of a particle were the result of a conspiracy of scientists. (No joke; the irony almost choked me.)

    Tomorrow I will have pictures to illustrate the process for him, but I doubt it will make a difference. To much of a gap between what you ‘know’ and what you are being asked to believe leads to cognitive dissonance and the (generally) abrupt refusal to consider the conflicting idea any farther.

  6. Well, I’m jumping in late to the fray here, but as the guy who kicked off the “dispiriting comments” in the previous post, I have to say Sean’s arguments were pretty convincing for me.

    But not quite convincing enough for me to rule out my own personal “para” experiences as confirmation bias. So the most attractive option left to me is to turn to the ever-popular reality as a computer simulation framework, discussed here before. To which I think I can add some valuable contributions.

    Here’s what I’m toying with:

    We’re all Non Player Characters in a massive multiplayer computer game. At least I’m an NPC. Can’t say for sure about the rest of you – there could be some real players mixed in. Speaking for myself, I have some damn good AI, which, presumably, makes the game more fun for the real players.

    The reason that QM and GR don’t mesh is because they’re only approximations of “real physics” designed to make the in-game physics engine run more smoothly – in terms of processor cycles, it’s easier to render two separate, simplified approximations than exactly mimic whatever the real thing is.

    The player characters are most likely the world leaders, or the secret societies/skull and boneses out there – the ones driving our world to war all the time, because, let’s face it, war games sell. Imagine the ad campaign in the “real world” – “Will you join the War On Terror, will you strap on a suicide vest?Log into the multiverse now for only $20 a month!”

    Or perhaps the player characters are really aliens, and most of the action in the game is off earth. We’re like an easter egg or something, hiding as a brief distraction for those who find us – “Go ahead, abduct a few, see what makes them tick!”

    Anyway, back to us. I’m occasionally psychic because the code for this universe is all written, a priori – sometimes my server just processes it a little faster than others.

    The simplest plan in that case is to find out who the player characters are and extract the truth from them, by threatening to make the game no fun if they don’t comply. Can NPC’s be Griefers? Let’s find out.

  7. The only plausible circumstances that MPD might arise is in a callosotomy (severing the corpus callosum) at a very young age and then specifically training that person to develop redundant sets of skills such as language in each hemisphere. Kind of like siamese twins, just in one brain. There are no documented cases of such a thing – it’s science fiction. The brain just isn’t designed to support multiple personalities. There are crazy cases of dissociative fugue’s etc…, but not multiple personalities. It’s completely unsupported by evidence and flies in the face of all of cognitive science. Almost all cognitive disorders arise from the brain trying to present a single coherent picture. That the brain would suddenly try to present two of them is preposterous IMHO, which is based on the lack of verifiable cases so far.

  8. I am a very old non scientist who stumbled on this site as a result of Sean’s magnificent Teaching Company course on the “Dark Side”.

    With a smile, Sean’s masterful discussion reminds me of Aristotle’s dismissal of the heliocentric description of the solar system because no one could detect stellar parallax. Certainly any claims of para normal senses/abilities should require extraordinary proof that does not now exist. However, whether this is because none are warranted or because we lack the technology to detect and analyze them is simply unknown. At the moment, the former appears more likely.

    Nevertheless, from a risk/reward perspective, should we abandon continuing exploration of para-normal phenomenon? As Sean point out in his “Dark Side” course outline, the topic “has no practical purpose in terms of technology or economic benefit.” If I hear the phrase “string Theory” again I may vomit at the very unscientific use of the term “theory”. There is more anecdotal evidence for para-normal phenomenon and more opportunity to turn parts into actual testable hypothesis than there appears to be for any string speculations that show little promise of even reaching the hypothesis stage.

    On the reward side, if we humans ever develop the technology to improve our ability to communicate or empathize, the upside seems fairly obvious. So would the ability to influence the healing and/or improved operation of our bodies and minds.

    On the other hand, one might speculate that the rest of the universe communicates in the 95% of “reality” that is in the dark spectrum so if we ever want to join the crowd we had better learn how.

    But “easy steps fpr little feet” as the first encyclopaedia I ever read said. Cosmology, string speculation, etc. are interesting, even fascinating and a important part of being human. So is our current inability to detect the equivalent of “parallax”. But in terms of reward, learning how to be a better, more effective human by using our brains/minds in ways that we might now call para-normal has rewards that seem orders of magnitude greater than making sure our research conforms with the “Standard Model” enlarged to include gravity which it doesn’t. So long as the odds are non-zero, putting some of our money on this chip does not seem crazy.

    Sam

  9. Lawrence B. Crowell

    John Merryman on Feb 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
    Sean makes a logical argument for why we cannot bend spoons with our minds, minus the medium of hands, but can anyone offer a clear reason why timetravel is scientifically implausible, if not impossible?
    Given that Relativity treats it as a fundamental dimension similar to space, we are treated to any number of wormholes, branes, alternate universes, etc. explaining how it might be possible and that is all well and good, because scientific inquiry requires a consideration of all possibilities.

    —————-

    One way we can question time travel is to ponder the prospect that if you went back in time and killed your parents this leads to a logical contradiction of a causal nature. Of course spacetime solutions for closed timelike loops only permit so called time travel after the “machine” is turned on. Yet one can imagine that in a time loop event A leads to B, which leads to C, which in turn back in time leads to not-A.

    A more physics argument against time travel is that the momentum energy source term (tensor) for such a spacetime violates energy conditions established by Hawking and Penrose. The energy (time-time) part T^{tt} is less than 0 and since this is built up from a Lagrangian and a Hamiltonian this leads to negative energy states of a queer nature. Since everything is presumed to be quantum mechanical so would be the mass-energy or fields that are the source of the spacetime. They also have no minimum energy eigenvalue — such as how the hydrogen atom has the 1S state at the “bottom.” As such the particles of this strange field “unobtanium” will cascade forever into negative energy and by energy conservation spew an infinite amount of energy to the outside world. Nobody wants this in quantum field theory, so states are bounded below and this field probably does not exist.

    A time machine is also something which could exist with no cause. Suppose you got instructions on how to build a time machine, you build it and get famous. But you also remember to send the plans to yourself in the past. There is a strange quantum effect called the Wheeler Delayed Choice Experiment (WDCE). You can decide to measure or not measure whether a photon went through slit A or B after it is known to have passed that point. The quantum measurement issue still works. It turns out in a little bit I wrote some years ago that a version of the Shor factorization algorithm could be solved in a similar way. By doing a form of the WDCE quantum bits can be computed in the past and the wave function must be conformed in such as way as to give the factorization. It is a quantum time machine of sorts, for the actual algorithmic loop is never executed, just as with the time machine you don’t figure it out. Though in reality no information or causal influence in the quantum case is actually sent back in time.

    Lawrence B. Crowell

  10. Maybe spoon bending is exactly like spoon bending in The Matrix–namely our existence is really a computer simulation and the programmers are free to ‘change the rules’ at will (though it seems they rarely use this power). Unlike in The Matrix, we would have no free will and wouldn’t be able to control the simulation ourselves. But, Bostrom has argued that if some civilizations live long enough then perhaps most “observers” are actually simulations, not the real deal. To me this is worse than suggesting we’re a Boltzmann brain, but I thought I’d throw it out there for all the sci-fi fans.

  11. “Our knowledge of the laws of physics rules them out.”

    So how do they happen?

    I am not now, nor have I ever been, a physicist, so anything you tell me about bosons and fermions I am forced to take on faith. I am reluctant to believe the ‘poor, deluded masses’ argument to explain peoples’ perceptions of psychic experiences. Is it not also likely that physicists are probably culled from people who have less tolerance for ambiguity and therefore prefer order provided by rules governing a known universe? (The bias argument works both ways.)

    I have been motivated by personal experiences to investigate the findings of parapsychology, and I believe it is at least recognized by parapsychologists that a force model is inadequate to explain these experiences. Some have looked to quantum physics for a possible explanation. I’m guessing that doesn’t sit well with you, given what I could glean from your post.

    You essentially ask us to take your word that psi is impossible because you represent an authority in physics. I cannot independently verify boson and fermions, or their effects. Nor am I familiar enough with the field of physics to know of any rules or applications that might be used to counter your argument, so, yes, you are making an appeal to authority. That I have little knowledge of physics is a shortcoming of mine, admittedly, but not one that will make me anymore inclined to trust authority over personal experience.

    It speaks ill of you that you belittle the experiences of so many people, and are so willing to summarily dismiss them out of hand because of your faith in what you know. I’d hardly call that ‘open-minded’.

  12. its quite certain they don’t exist (or if they do, terribly unreliable).

    eg; if I had telekinesis, I will take over the world, no one can stop me, I can stop your heart beating,squish your brain with just a sideways glance.

    if I had telepathy, I’ll be fcking rich.
    I’ll win at poker all the time, pass all my grades, win all television games, know all passwords/security/times/schedules.

    if I had precognition, I’ll win the lottery… all the time. (oh and I should be able to see the future where you key in your atm key as well)

    postcognition – well, I could see the past where you typed in your passwords too.

    instead, some has tk and chooses to bend spoons?

  13. Sean makes a potent argument against parapsychology, and I will not attempt to refute it.
    However, if we accept parapsychology as a subset of the study of consciousness in general, we find that not only does it remain an integral part of the big picture, but that physicists and scientists from all over the world, will converge on Tucson this spring for the 14th such conference: http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/tucson2008.htm

    I really think that if there was a strong consensus that parapsychology was pseudo-scientific BS, it would not be on the conference agenda, alongside an internationally respected set of researchers.
    Although NOW is the golden age of cosmology, parapsychology’s heyday was 30 yrs ago, when the CIA, KGB, UC Berkely, Princeton, SRI International, to name a few, were seriously investigating the reality of parapsychology.
    Did it fall out of fashion, or did some group deliver the coup d’etat to it ? Everyone seems eager to perform the eulogy, but I don’t think the funeral has yet ocurred.

  14. Lawrence,

    Time travel does present any number of cyclical conundrums, but is it entirely logical to consider time as a form of dimension? We can calculate essentially the same relationship between volume and temperature, as that between space and time, where the same amount of energy results in reduced temperature, with increased volume, but no one tries to argue that temperature and volume are the same, as they do with space and time. It is in fact the intuitive description of time that is linear, ie. narrative structure, cause and effect, history, etc. where one thing leads to another, but this is a reductionist perspective, encouraged by our own linear motion through space.

  15. Pingback: Telekenesis and Quantum Technology - Political Wrinkles

  16. 84. Sam Taylor: If I hear the phrase “String Theory” again I may vomit at the very unscientific use of the term “theory”. There is more anecdotal evidence for para-normal phenomenon and more opportunity to turn parts into actual testable hypothesis than there appears to be for any string speculations that show little promise of even reaching the hypothesis stage.

    As I mentioned just a few days ago, a comparison to string theory does not fare well for parapsychology. First, string theory has been heavily criticized for not being testable, so appealing to string theory to avoid criticism is not going to work. Second, as you acknowledge, ESP is much easier to test than string theory. Hypotheses have been formed. They have been tested. There are no reliable replicable results from that testing. Ever.

  17. 92. Damien: What about the research done at Princeton?

    What about it?

    The end of PEAR
    by Mark C. Chu-Carroll

    Including links to discussion of:

    An attempt to create a mathematical explanation for how consciousness affects reality. This work uses some of the worst fake math that I’ve ever seen….

    Skewing statistics to show that minds can affect the REG. …

    Post-Hoc data selection to create desired results. …

  18. As a theoretical physicist, I have to admit that I do not understand how our macroscopic experience follows from the rules of a quantum world. The dirty little secret is that nobody really does, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or keeping some unpublished knowledge to himself. There are furthermore many observed macroscopic phenomena that are only imperfectly understood, if at all, in terms of QCD. A 150 years ago the behaviour of the two-slit experiment would have been considered very much impossible on the basis of the then known laws of physics. One should therefore be a little humble and not prematurely dismiss a field that has not been sufficiently investigated using the scientific method (and no, it has not, despite statements to the contrary by those who are suddenly experts).

  19. moveon said:

    > Would it be possible to communicate by telepathy at all, then this would have an
    > obvious positive effect on survival, and it would have been developed by many
    > species.

    Would it be possible to communicate by words at all, then this would have an obvious positive effect on survival, and it would have been developed by many species. That only one species would be able to do this, and this barely, just does not make any sense.

  20. Anon,

    Would it be possible to communicate by words at all, then this would have an obvious positive effect on survival, and it would have been developed by many species. That only one species would be able to do this, and this barely, just does not make any sense.

    One of the points I make about the process of time is that while energy moves toward the future, events created fall away into the past. This corresponds to the relationship between our brain and our mind. While the physical reality of our brain moves into the future, our mind is the record of events as they fall away into the past. So while it is of long term benefit for human evolution to study this record of events for the lessons it tells us, it is a distraction from our concentration on the present and for many species, that can be dangerous.
    The extent of my experience with sensing others thought processes has been a consequence of being totally in the present and not distracted by my own stream of verbal consciousness, which I find I can sidetrack, if not totally turn off, by allowing it to lock on various verbal loops, like a song stuck in the head, then ignoring it.

  21. “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.”

    How do scientists KNOW all the forces in the universe, let alone KNOW the limits of such forces? Just because a force isn’t exerting it’s influence at one moment doesn’t preclude it from acting in another.

    How many dimensions are there? How many forces exist in those dimensions? How do we access them? What do they look like?

    Since you can’t answer these questions without being a charlatan or intellectually dishonest, a scientist has to admit that there are HUGE wholes in our knowledge of the universe. This article assumed too much.

  22. Lawrence B. Crowell

    Time is somewhat strange in relativity. It is a fourth dimension in that a distance in flat spacetime is

    $latex
    ds^2~=~-c^2dt^2~+~dx^2~+~dy^2~+~dz^2
    $

    for ds an infinitesimal unit of distance, sometimes called the proper time or the invariant interval. This distance is an invariant so a coordinate transformation to another frame will preserve this interval. For this reason spatial directions and time (coordinate time t) are interchanged. Yet in general relativity if one considers space as something “pushed forward” in time the basic equations don’t explicitly involve time! It turns out that time is something the analyst imposes on the problem —- one is free to push time forward in what ever way one wants. It is analogous to a gauge condition in electromagnetism or any Yang-Mills gauge field.

    In fact general relativity is about the relationship between particles, it is not about the relationship between points. Time, and for that matter the geometry of space as well in a momentum condition, are not determined but imposed. The Einstein field equation are then used to compute the relationships between particles, such as the geodesic deviation equation. In this way spatial variables and time are from external coordinate conditions which are conditions on external variable analogous to setting a gauge conditions on internal variables.

    In a strange sense, time does not really exist in the concrete we normally think!

    I threw out the WDCE and the “quantum time machine” as a bit of a teaser, but noone took the bait. One might argue that this should permit some form of precognition, say if the “quantum mind” can be entangled with events in the future. Yet as I stressed nonlocal entanglements don’t involve the communication of information.

    As Victor Stenger puts it with paranormalism, “In every other field that I can think of, such a sustained record of negative results over so many years would have long ago resulted in the sought after phenomenon being declared non-existent.” For similar reasons scientists don’t pursue research programs to detect the influence of angels.

    Lawrence B. Crowell

  23. >Would it be possible to communicate by words at all,
    >then this would have an obvious positive effect on
    >survival, and it would have been developed by many
    >species. That only one species would be able to do
    >this, and this barely, just does not make any sense.

    Cool bit of sarcasm.

    But….

    …animals DO communicate through electromagnetic means. The *extent* to which that communication became evolved is what words are all about. But telepathy does not seem to exist even in rudimentary form in the animal kingdom. There was some debate about elephants congregating as if through magic, but then it was discovered that they were communicating through infrasonic sound waves.

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