Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (25 page)

None of which says the paranormal does work that way, or even that the paranormal exists. I am saying the case can be made sufficiently to justify the paranormal in
science
fiction.

What about claims of precognition? One of Targ's remote-viewing subjects claimed he could
preview
the location where the roaming experimenter would visit. Can we identify any candidate mechanisms for that?

Imagine a video of milk separating itself out of a latte. Most people would suspect the imagery was running backward. Why? Because for the milk to spontaneously separate from the black coffee is so improbable. That we implicitly recognize the universe's tendency toward disorder is one theory for why we experience time flowing in one direction. Metaphorically, that flow is called "time's arrow."

If time flows one way, from past to future, how might precognition be possible?

Once more, we catch a tantalizing glimpse in the workings of quantum mechanics.

Among its many weirdnesses, quantum mechanics embraces a curious duality. Such entities as electrons and photons sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves. This duality is best illustrated with the oft-performed double-slit experiment.

A device we will call an emitter shoots photons one by one toward a screen. Between the emitter and the screen sits a foil obstacle that is solid except for two slits. A photon can only reach the screen by passing through one or both slits in the foil. So does the photon pass through one slit, like a particle? Or does it pass through both slits, like a wave? If the former, the photon will light up one small spot on the screen. If the latter, the photon wave will spread out from both slits, forming a distributed interference pattern on the screen.
²²

The trick answer: the outcome depends on how we perform the experiment. If we watch the slits and see where the photon goes, the screen shows a one-spot (photon as particle) result. If we do not watch, the screen shows an interference pattern (photon as wave) result. Honest. That's how it works. The physicist John Wheeler proposed a variation on the double-slit experiment. The screen in his experiment is removable. Behind the screen are placed two detectors, each aligned with one of the foil's two slits.

So: if the screen remains in place and we don't watch the photon going through the foil, we'll see an interference pattern on the screen. If we remove the screen, the photon must strike one of the two detectors.

Now comes the interesting, "delayed choice" part of Wheeler's experiment. Let t1 be the time the photon reaches the foil. Let t3 be the time when the photon will reach the position of the removable screen.

We may (with very fast reflexes) whisk the screen from the experimental apparatus at time t2, where t1

Did the photon keep an eye on us, and see how we tried to trick it? If so, that's one very clever photon! It seems at least as likely that our action at t2, whisking away the screen, retroactively determined what (appeared to have?) happened at t1. In plain English, it looks like we had an influence backward in time!

To complicate matters further, we (or the apparatus we built), by choosing to pull out the screen, or not, play a role in the experiment's outcome. Is the photon's response to our intervention a vote in favor of quantum consciousness?

This delayed-choice experiment has been performed and the backward-in-time influence verified.
²³

So: if the paranormal is a manifestation of quantum entanglement and quantum particles react (in at least one plausible interpretation of a real-world experiment) to a future event, then precognition would appear to be plausible.

Fooled you!

Although physicists speak of quantum teleportation, they're referring to quantum entanglement, not to teleportation in the popular, "Beam me up, Scotty," sense.

A binary digit (bit) in a digital computer has the value of either zero or one. A quantum bit (qubit) can take the value zero, one, or—everything quantum is weird—unknown. More precisely, that third condition is an indeterminately weighted combination (in QM-speak, a superposition) of the zero and one states. The values of a qubit can be encoded on a quantum particle, such as an electron with any of: spin oriented up, spin oriented down, or spin "don't know."

We'll take two quantum particles (say, electrons) and encode them with data. If they are not identical, they can, with great care, be entangled. To be entangled, then, one is spin up and the other spin down—or both are spin indeterminate. We separate the entangled electrons, very carefully, doing nothing to either disturb or measure their spin states.

Now
we measure the spin state (qubit value) of one of the entangled electrons. When we do, our action also immediately determines the spin state of the other half of the entangled pair. If we measure spin up, the remote electron is spin down. If we measure spin down, the remote electron is spin up. No measurement gives a result of "spin unknown" because the act of measurement—like the act of passing through a slit in foil—forces a specific outcome.

In a sense, reading the spin state of one electron has transferred a spin state to the distant member of the pair. In theory and (to any known experiment) in practice, nothing travels between the two electrons. Change to the entangled particle just happens. That's what physicists call quantum teleportation. The mechanism seems (at the least) to be insufficient for the paranormal conveyance of physical objects.

Some experiments—none without controversy—suggest the existence of paranormal phenomena. Said phenomena—if they exist— are unaffected by electromagnetic shielding and, at least on terrestrial scales, insensitive to distance. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics and consciousness—also contentious, but nonetheless academically respectable—appear to be compatible with reports of telepathy, remote viewing, and precognition.
²⁴

That's a lot of qualifiers—

But nowhere in there do I see a
dis
qualifier for the use (with great care) of at least these so-called paranormal abilities in even hard SF.

The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
Jeffrey T. Richelson, 2002 (chapter "The CIA's Psychic Friends").
The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of

Psychic Abilities,
Russell Targ, 2012.

http://rhine.org/
Website of the Rhine Research Center.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PsychicPowers.

Science Fiction and Science Fact:An Encyclopedia,
Brian Stableford, 2006, articles on parapsychology and John W. Campbell.

1 "An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning," Jessica Utts,
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/air.pdf

2 The null hypothesis is the default assumption of any experiment: that events or variables under study are unrelated. Any assertion to the contrary must be convincingly proven.

3 "Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena," Ray Hyman,
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/hyman.html

4 Funny story. The earliest description (to my knowledge) of remote viewing comes from Herodotus. In
The Histories,
he reports that the great king Croesus (as in "as rich as...") sought to test the prominent oracles of his day. Via messengers, Croesus tasked the oracles to report what he would be doing one hundred days after those messengers had set out from Lydia. Not even the messengers knew. (The correct answer involved cooking lamb and turtle together in a bronze cauldron.)

The Delphic oracle got it right—in hexameter verse, no less—and so Croesus next asked for an augury involving matters of state. (Like all good auguries, the prophecy was ambiguous, and Croesus took it the wrong way. He invaded Persia and lost his kingdom.)

5 "Three in Four Americans Believe in Paranormal: Little change from similar results in 2001," David W. Moore, Gallup News Service,
http://www.gallup.com/poll/16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal. aspx.

To reach three in four required conflating the paranormal with the supernatural. In
this
article, you'll find nothing of ghosts, séances, reincarnation, astrology, or channeling of the dead.

6 Quoted from the home page of the Society for Psychical Research,
http://www.spr.ac.uk/main/.

7 For example, from a 1998 interview in
Skeptical Inquirer
with Martin Gardner (longtime math and science writer for
Scientific American):

"It has often been pointed out that as Rhine slowly learned how to tighten his controls, his evidence of psi became weaker and weaker. However, the evidence will not become convincing to other psychologists until an experiment is made that is repeatable by skeptics. So far, no such experiment has been made."

See
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/mind_at_play_an_interview_with_martin_gardner/

8 "A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research," Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ,
Proceedings of the IEEE,
March 1976. (IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an international professional society.)

9 "Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding," Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff,
Nature,
18 October 1974.

10 "Information transmission in remote viewing experiments," David Marks & Richard Kammann,
Nature,
17 August 1978.

11
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,
Carl Sagan, 1996.

12 And also, for completeness, in video games (e.g., telekinesis in BioShock) and graphic novels (e.g., a variety of abilities among the X-Men). This article won't look further at those media.

13 Like many of Campbell's best, this story appeared under his Don A. Stuart pseudonym.

14
Collected Editorials from Analog,
selected by Harry Harrison, 1966.

15 A device said to sense the material-specific "eloptic energy" emanations from solid objects. The term
eloptic
seems intended to evoke thoughts of electromagnetism and optics. The detector required a person in the loop, and Campbell saw the device as dependent upon its operator's psi abilities.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_machine.

16
I, Asimov: A Memoir,
Isaac Asimov, 1994.

17 Or in at least one instance, tested the paranormal at a range far exceeding the terrestrial. In a 1973 experiment, Targ's subject, while remotely viewing Jupiter, sketched that planet with rings. Voyager 1 first glimpsed rings of Jupiter in 1979. Did the rings in that sketch stem from remote viewing, extrapolation from Saturn's rings, or a lucky guess? Before you answer, consider that in
Gulliver's Travels
(1726) Jonathon Swift gave Mars two small, close-orbiting moons—long before astronomer Asaph Hall first observed Phobos and Deimos in 1877.

18 Newton's equation: Force = Gm
₁
m
₂
/R
²
, where F is the attractive force between two masses, G is the gravitational constant, m
₁
and m
₂
are the two masses attracting one another, and R is the separation between those masses.

For the Earth and the Sun, R is about 93 million miles—that would be action at
quite
the distance.

19 Does the instantaneous nature of quantum entanglement mean Einstein was mistaken about light speed as the universal limit? No, because no
thing
can go faster than light is not a precise statement of the limit. Special Relativity says that no
information
(of which a physical object is an example) can exceed light speed in a vacuum. Entangled particles cannot be used to convey
information
faster than light.

Why not? Because signaling via entanglement requires ambiguity in the states of the paired particles. Measure the state of one particle and you learn something about the state of the other particle— without knowing how the act of measurement disturbed the system. That ambiguity precludes information transfer at superluminal speeds.

20 As I discussed in more detail in "Alien Dimensions: The Universe Next Door," in the April 2014
Analog
issue.

21 See
Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness,
Roger Penrose, 1994.

22 Each slit becomes a new wave source, radiating toward the screen. Each wave has crests and troughs. Where the two spreading waves encounter the screen crest-of-one on top of troughof-the-other, the waves cancel. At such a point, the screen shows nothing. Where the two waves encounter the screen crest upon crest or trough upon trough, the waves add. There, the screen shows a strong signal.

23 For a more complete exposition of the double-slit experiment with delayed choice (with supporting video), see "Funny Things Happen When Space And Time Vanish," by Marcelo Gleiser, at
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/05/28/186886914/funny-things-happen-when-space-and-timevanish.

24 If a candidate physical explanation exists for psychokinesis, mental healing, or the teleportation of physical objects, I have not seen it.

A physicist and computer scientist, Edward M. Lerner toiled in the vineyards of aerospace and high tech for thirty years. Then, suitably intoxicated, he began writing science fiction full time. When not prospecting beneath his sofa cushions for small change for his first spaceflight, he writes technothrillers like
Energized
(powersats), the InterstellarNet adventures of First
and
Second Contact and, with Larry Niven, the
Fleet of Worlds
series of space operas. Ed's website is
edwardmlerner.com.