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From: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Parascience
Message-ID: <458@oakhill.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 03:47:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: oakhill.458
Posted: Thu Jun 20 03:47:49 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 01:20:37 EDT
References: <272@sri-arpa.ARPA> <216@unccvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: davet@oakhill.UUCP (Dave Trissel)
Organization: Motorola Inc. Austin, Tx
Lines: 43

In article <216@unccvax.UUCP> dsi@unccvax.UUCP writes:
>
>    Does anyone know the structure of one of those devices used to 'prove'
>paranormal/PK existence? ...
>

There are two basic designs both which should produce pure random events.  The
first is based upon a noise diode triggering a free running counter.  By
taking samples at "large" intervals of a millisecond one can obtain a very
large number of random yes/no responses.  One guy here at Motorola built just
such a device for a series of parapsychological experiments here in Austin.
Letting the device run for several days proved that it was indeed producing
random values from 0 to 9 (it was rigged up to a decade counter) over any
interval approaching a second or longer.  I was in the first dry-run
experiment and managed to bias it in an unusal way - it would come up with
a statistically significant higher count of even numbers than odd.
Interesting in that I "like" even numbers somehow over odd ones.

The second design is based on detecting quantum events such as radioactive
decay.  These are usually built by companies which specialize in producing
random event devices for scientific uses.
The events are recorded such that they represent a 0 or 1 indication.
Experiments show that almost anyone can bias these devices (i.e. no super
psychic needed) and that animals also cause biases.

One physicist Helmut Schmidt in San Antonio has done experiments for years
using the decay method for the most part.  I believe it was he who had a
"random machine" company fly their engineers in when he reported he could
bias it quite easily.  They supposedly left stumped.  (I presume it would
not be good business for them to broadcast the incident :-)  .)

I have not kept up with all of this for several years, but back when I was
involved there seemed to be several good studies done with random events which
indicated a high possibility of Psychokinetic effects (PK) being real.  Lately
experiments have entered the biological arena where supposedly every-day
off the street people seem to be able to alter the mutation of E. coli
bacteria.  However I have not studied this carefully and don't know how
reliable these studies are.  They do seem to be quite reproducible though.

Given the above I find it somewhat interesting that many people think there
have not been reproducible experiments to indicate PSI functioning.

 -- Dave Trissel      {ihnp4,seismo}!ut-sally!oakhill!davet