A Cornell University researcher claims to have discovered the ability of humans to predict the future
Daryl Bem's article was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and its preprint (a version that may differ in minor details from the final one) is available to everyone. Boehm argues that the experiments they conducted do not in the least disrupt causation.
Greetings from the future?
So, in one of several described experiments, the subjects were shown on the screen an image of a wall with two curtains. Under one of them (under which one was chosen at random) there was an erotic photograph, and under the other there was nothing. From the point of view of probability theory, the percentage of hits on the pictures should have been 50%, but in a series with a hundred participants and 36 attempts per person, there were more correct answers - 53.1%.
In another experiment, participants were shown a series of photographs and asked to rate them on a like-dislike scale, after which (as soon as the rating was made), the words beautiful (beautiful) or ugly (ugly) were shown on the screen for 1/30 of a second, chosen at random way. Processing the results showed that those pictures that were followed by the display of the word ugly were rated lower than those receiving the opposite epithet.
Similarly, the effect of the pictures shown after the subjects evaluated a pair of pictures was tested. In these experiments, where a hundred participants also took part, more than strange effects were also found - somehow the participants gave answers that were extremely unlikely from the point of view of probability theory!
Fantastic
"- The tachyon weapon has a special relationship with time. - Lemak gently stroked the barrel of his own" Excalibur ". - You know, this cannon shoots almost a second before you pull the trigger" (Sergey Lukyanenko, "Dream Line").
Tachyons are particles moving faster than the speed of light. Considered in some physical theories, absent in the now accepted Standard Model. How they could provide a full second of winning for the shooter is not very clear, but it would be strange to look for a complete correspondence of science fiction to even unconfirmed theories! In the described work, by the way, knowledge of the very near future did not help the hero:
"It is very disappointing to shoot, having already seen that you missed"
Promotional video:
Is this reproduced?
It is necessary to ask an important question - was it possible to repeat the experiments somewhere else? After all, for example, the flights of David Copperfield are not yet a reason to talk about the discovery of antigravity, just as many spectacular tricks at first glance also violate all conceivable laws of physics. However, science is also science, that in it there is not enough a single case to study the phenomenon.
To the laboratory!
Eyewitness stories about UFOs, abduction by aliens, healing cancer with kerosene, the miraculous effect of charmed water on a neighbor's cat - all this is more likely to fall into the sphere of interests of scientists studying folklore. Or, at worst, the psychology of superstition and the nature of rumor spreading. Another thing is the registration of something unusual in the laboratory, under conditions that can at least in principle be repeated (it is difficult to build some devices like the LHC, but it is possible).
With the reproduction of Boehm's results, the picture is ambiguous. On the one hand, he himself refers to two studies, of which one confidently confirmed at least one of Boehm's experiments (in the other, exactly those 50% of the “predicted” choice of pictures, which are laid down according to the theory of probability, turned out). On the other hand, scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and California (Berkeley) have already submitted their report on the attempt to reproduce - the result is negative.
This does not put an end to Behm's works (after all, discoveries are not always reproduced in much more "traditional" spheres - the fatigue virus, for example, many groups could not find), but makes at least wait with statements like "scientists have proved the existence of paranormal phenomena."
However, we note one more important detail: two scientists who did not find the effect described by Boehm used online testing. According to Bem, this is a rather unreliable denial - sitting in front of the screen at home, participants could be distracted by anything. Critics at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon admit this and say they are going to check everything again.
What was it?
Assuming that the results are inherently correct (Boehm, unlike a number of amateurs, at least at least conducted experiments, the scheme of which later allows for some kind of scientific discussion), let us turn to those hypotheses that were put forward on the pages of his article.
First, Boehm suggests, the participants could have obtained information from the future in some completely unexplored way. How exactly, modern science cannot say, since not a single known phenomenon has so far indicated the transfer of information from the future to the past.
Second, the participants could read information directly from the computer in an equally incomprehensible way. Although it does not give off such a deep revolution in the scientific picture of the world, it is also very strange - not only is it not very clear how exactly a person could do this, but it is also difficult to answer the question: “How did you manage to decode information from computer memory?"
Experiments on the influence of consciousness (or the unconscious) on random processes were carried out for 28 years at Princeton. In the photo - a participant is trying to influence how metal balls are scattered over a series of columns
Source: PEAR
Third, the participants could unknowingly influence the operation of the program using the random number generator. This hypothesis could, by the way, be supported by a series of experiments that were carried out for almost three decades at Princeton University (laboratory of Robert Yang), but the problem is that it was not possible to reliably prove the possibility of unconscious influence on random processes. Jan's laboratory was closed due to the apparent futility.
Humor of programmers on the topic of random numbers. Translation into Russian - in the code of a program designed to produce a random number, it is said to always issue a four and there is a programmer's postscript: “I honestly rolled a 4 on the die, this is really a random number”
Source: XKCD
The fourth possible explanation, which is given in Behm's article, is that there was nothing supernatural, and just the random number generator in the program was not very good. Any random numbers that are generated programmatically are really just pseudo-random. It is possible that, in fact, the participants simply guessed some pattern in the work of the program, hence all the deviations in the statistics.
The issue of Behm's conscientiousness and attentiveness remains outside the scope of the original article (a number of previous experiments in parapsychology, upon careful analysis, turned out to be fraud on the part of experimenters, their assistants or participants), but it should be noted that even those who regard the scientist's results as "ridiculous") do not immediately find significant flaws in the experiments.
An experiment with telepaths on social networks
Professor Richard Weissman also conducted experiments designed to believe in the existence of the phenomenon of telepathy. He went to some randomly selected location and asked numerous readers of his personal site to try to describe their whereabouts.
After processing the results of this not very serious, but amusing study, it turned out that the percentage of correct descriptions was depressingly low - you could just as well have given random answers.
Joachim Krueger, professor of psychology at Brown University (USA), says bluntly that he does not believe in Boehm's results, but at the same time does not yet understand what exactly is wrong in his experiments. So the story is definitely worth following.
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