Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  Many of these experiments involved a test subject and an interviewer isolated inside a windowless and shielded room (i.e., an enclosure designed to preclude signaling via electromagnetic radiation). The test subject was tasked to describe what a third party was seeing—or in the case of precognition experiments, what the third party would see. The interviewer would ask questions to clarify what the subject saw. Subject/interviewer dialogues were recorded; sometimes the subject would sketch or build clay models of the distant scene. The perceived scene (as captured in the recordings and any sketches and models) and the actual scene were then compared and the degree of match graded. In one test series, the locations were chosen from among sixty points of interest randomly visited across greater San Francisco; scoring depended on an evaluator identifying from the test subject's remote-viewing report the place the third party visited.

  The lead experimenters for the CIA studies were Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, both laser physicists. Some of their early results with remote viewing appeared in two prestigious journals: Proceedings of the IEEE 8 and Nature, 9 and Targ continues to cite these papers in substantiation of his claims.

  On the other hand, Nature accompanied Targ's article with an editorial that stated:

  There was agreement that the paper was weak in design and presentation, to the extent that details given as to the precise way in which the experiment was carried out were disconcertingly vague.... All the referees felt that the details given of various safeguards and precautions introduced against the possibility of conscious or unconscious fraud on the part of one or other of the subjects were "uncomfortably vague."

  A few years later, Nature published an additional disclaimer: an article by psychologists unable to replicate Targ and Puthoff's results. 10

  While the remote-viewing experiments reduced or eliminated the "decline effect' sometimes attributed to subject boredom, in the process they sacrificed objective scoring. Consider the complexity of scoring these experiments. In how many features, and in what details of particular features, can the remotely viewed scene and the actual scene differ and still be counted as a match? Suppose the subject sketches a scene with several points of similarity to the visited location—but adds other details that correspond, if at all, only with structures that were present decades earlier. Does that circumstance count as a mismatch or as an instance of viewing remote in space and time?

  In short, the determination of a match in each remote-viewing experiment was subjective, putting into question claims of statistical significance when aggregating results across several experiments.

  The CIA's motivation, of course, was not scientific curiosity, and the Agency insisted upon more practical demonstrations. Test subjects were given geographical coordinates and asked to describe what they saw. One designated location corresponded to a suspected Soviet research facility that had been observed by spy satellite. The subject sketched a large crane in significant detail, matching a structure in the satellite image—and also several buildings that did not exist. Proponents of remote viewing claim credit for the crane. Skeptics focus on the discrepancies—and indeed, the subject might have drawn bunches of structures in the hopes of getting one right.

  In another test, a CIA agent gave the coordinates of his private cabin in the woods. The test subject came back with a description with similarities to a nearby NSA facility. Was this experiment a success (the subject was drawn to a facility of claimed psychic significance to the CIA) or a failure (the viewed scene was not at the specified coordinates)? In the same experiment, the subject reported reading words and phrases out of file cabinets. Some of the vocabulary matched out-of-date NSA code words. Was this a success (real code words detected from a distance)? Or did those words popping up somehow reflect that those code words had been in effect when Targ, the interviewer in the room with the subject, had worked for the NSA?

  Interpretation

  In short, proponents and skeptics alike claim support for their positions from these studies. Such divergence can reflect honest differences of opinion. For a particular event of claimed paranormal significance, it's no small task to ascertain a probable cause. Was an anomalous phenomenon at work or something more mundane? How does one preclude every alternate explanation of:

  • Fraud (whether by test subject or experimenter).

  • Unintentional cuing (the test subject responding, even subconsciously, to the observer's reactions).

  • Experimental design flaws.

  • Wishful interpretation of ambiguous results.

  • Statistical outliers (toss a coin often enough and you will see ten heads in a row).

  Some skeptics discount any asserted demonstration of the paranormal until fraud can be ruled out—no proof of actual fraud required. Are paranormal researchers guilty until proven innocent? Isn't that an unjust standard? As we've seen, researchers in the field often have significant scientific credentials.

  The counterargument: scientists are unprepared for experiments that might lie to them. Per Carl Sagan, "Scientists are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets reluctantly but who fights fair... Magicians, on the other hand, are in the deception business." 11 James P. Hogan, in his novel Code of the Life Maker, used a magician cum mind reader to drive home the same point.

  Given (a) the ambiguities of the experiments and (b) the absence of a physical mechanism to explain the reported results, many scientists discount the whole paranormal topic.

  The requirements for science fiction are less rigorous. As long as the paranormal hasn't been dis proven, there is ample latitude for storytelling....

  The paranormal in science fiction

  There's a lot of the paranormal in science fiction, literary and dramatic, 12 and I'll limit myself to a few examples organized by paranormal ability. Almost always that ability manifests without any more explanation than that a character has a gift or a mutation, takes a drug, or survived traumatic events that awakened an ability latent in everyone. At the physical level, any of those is no explanation at all.

  As illustrations, I lean toward classics of the field.

  Telepathy, mind reading, and empathy:

  • Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man (incidentally, the first Hugo Award winner) explored the effects on society of telepathy.

  • Robert Heinlein, in Time for the Stars (1956), used telepathy between separated twins for instantaneous communications between starship and distant Earth.

  • The Star Trek TV/movie franchise has the often plot-convenient Vulcan mind melds.

  • David Brin's Uplift Universe series offers the Tymbrimi species, members of which cast and receive emotional "glyphs" through cranial tendrils.

  • Richard Phillips's 2012 Rho Agenda series, whose heroes, their minds tweaked by alien technology, learn to communicate telepathically.

  Teleportation:

  • Again from Alfred Bester, from 1956, we have The Stars My Destination (in the UK, Tiger! Tiger!) extending teleportation ("jaunting") to interplanetary distances.

  • From Steven Gould, in 1992, we have Jumper (later a movie by the same name) and its sequels, Reflex and Impulse.

  Psychokinesis (aka telekinesis):

  • From 1952, in the pages of Astounding, Jack Vance's novella "Telek."

  • The 1981 movie Scanners —see heads explode!

  • Stephen King's 1974 debut novel (and later the movie) Carrie —see lots of stuff explode and burn and...

  Miscellaneous psychic powers:

  • Precognition, as in Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" (later adapted as a movie).

  • Mind control, as practiced by Jedi and Sith alike in the Star Wars universe.

  • Psychic navigation, as performed by spice-altered navigators of Frank Herbert's Dune series (several of which were first serialized in Analog).

  • Psychic wish fulfillment, as in Jerome Bixby's eerie 1953 story "It's a Good Life."

  • Multitalented paranormal supermen: A. E. V
an Vogt's Slan (first serialized in Astounding, September through December 1940).

  • And given the degree of skepticism as to whether paranormal phenomena even exist, let us not forget hoaxers such as the private investigators on the popular TV series Psych.

  That's but a small sampling, with these (and other) psychic powers popping up in science fiction of every length, in all media.

  John W. Campbell, Analog, and the paranormal

  In 1937, a few months before John W. Campbell took over the editorial reins at Astounding, his story "Forgetfulness" appeared in the magazine. 13 In that story, alien starfarers visit a far-future Earth whose few human residents appear to be in terminal decline. The latter have abandoned ancient cities of mile-high towers to live in twenty-foot domes. Communicating telepathically with their visitors, humans appear at a loss to explain anything about technologies once wielded by their mighty ancestors. It's sad, the aliens think, as they prepare to colonize—only to experience time and space bent by the thoughts of a super-evolved human for whom spaceships are almost as quaint as flint arrowheads.

  SF encyclopedist Brian Stableford speculates that Campbell was predisposed toward paranormal possibilities by reason of having attended Duke University while J. B. Rhine was performing his famous series of experiments there. Whether or not that's the case, the paranormal (which Campbell preferred to call "psionics") fascinated the man. In a 1959 editorial "We Must Study Psi" 14 Campbell wrote:

  Dr. Rhine originally started his investigation of psi because, as a professional psychologist, he had come to the conclusion that psychology-as-such lacked an essential element. You would have an exceedingly hard time working out biochemistry, if your chemistry hadn't discovered nitrogen, for example. Rhine's studies led him to suspect something about as important as nitrogen to biochemistry was missing from psychology.

  And:

  Ours is the only culture that officially denies magic. And... ours does not, by several millennia, qualify as a "very long" culture. The denial of magic is only about three centuries old. You can fool a large percentage of a people for that short a period of time.

  The psi machines I've encountered work—and they work on precisely the same ancient laws of magic that those wide-scattered peoples have, independently, accepted.

  In the same editorial, Campbell discusses dowsing, the Hieronymus machine, 15 and the application of psi to photos of crops to protect physical crops from insects.

  A bit more about Campbell: He studied physics at MIT and completed his B.S. at Duke University. Isaac Asimov called Campbell, "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely." 16

  As editor, Campbell treated psi as a core element of "hard"—that is, scientifically based— science fiction. Convinced or not, many Astounding authors of the Campbell era incorporated the paranormal into their stories (some of which we've already seen).

  But just suppose

  I mostly write the hard stuff: science fiction that won't cause scientists and engineers to hurl my books across the room in dismay. (Such, anyway, is my goal.) Could I, were I to so choose, write hard SF involving the paranormal?

  As it happens, yes.

  Rhine and Targ did not attempt to explain the paranormal, only to demonstrate the effect and to make observations. Targ asserts that remote viewing is both unaffected by electromagnetic shielding and insensitive to range over terrestrial distances. 17

  Having already looked at the controversy surrounding efforts to exhibit the paranormal, let's ask a different question. Does modern physics suggest ways in which minds could have such paranormal abilities?

  For at least some of the claimed abilities, yes.

  Getting on the same wavelength?

  Consider extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation, with frequencies of just a few Hertz (aka, cycles per second). Any wave's frequency and wavelength (the distance that separates two adjacent crests) vary reciprocally; ELF radiation—with wavelengths in the thousands of miles!—passes unimpeded through the thin metal sheets and screens that comprise conventional shielding.

  To an ELF wave, the Earth's surface and the ionosphere are two sides of a naturally occurring waveguide. Whereas freely propagating electromagnetic radiation (say, the light emitted by a bulb) spreads in all directions and rapidly attenuates with distance according to an inverse square law, EM waves confined to a waveguide (say, light traveling through a fiberoptic cable) propagate in one direction, along the waveguide—and do not attenuate.

  No attenuation and immunity from conventional shielding; that sounds like a candidate mechanism for the paranormal. Right? No, and it's again related to ELF radiation's long wavelengths. Not only does no known structure in the human brain generate or receive ELF waves, it's hard to see how the brain, or even the entire human body, could interact with waves thousands of miles long.

  From the large to the very small (a necessary digression)

  A more promising option can be found in quantum mechanics: the branch of physics that describes phenomena at atomic (and smaller) scales. To appreciate how quantum mechanics might apply, we must first take a detour through classical (pre-QM) physics.

  Our intuition and experience tells us that separated objects do not interact. Isaac Newton, despite the tremendous predictive power of his formula in characterizing gravitational attraction—after more than three centuries, it's accurate enough to plan most NASA space missions—struggled with the counterintuitive implication of his equation: that somehow gravity acts at a distance. 18 Indeed, Newton called the notion, "so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

  Newton was correct to have doubts. Albert Einstein's more complete theory of gravity, formally known as General Relativity, shows— simplifying furiously—that the gravitational attraction seemingly exerted between objects across great distances actually results from (a) mass warping space-time and (b) one object interacting with the local curvature of space-time caused by that other object. Or, as physicist John Wheeler so elegantly (if anthropomorphically) captured the essence of General Relativity in twelve words: "Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move."

  Among the eerier attributes of quantum mechanics is non locality: interaction between distant objects without any intermediary... anything. Two particles (such as electrons) that once interacted and then separate can maintain a relationship known as quantum entanglement. For as long as the particles remain entangled, a change in one (say, the orientation of the first electron's spin) causes a complementary change to the second (makes it spin in the opposite orientation). The entanglement mechanism operates independently of distance—and instantaneously. 19 Through entanglement, the paired particles become, in some sense, a single entity.

  Einstein called this entangled behavior "spooky action at a distance" and considered it evidence of a crack in the foundations of the then-young theory of quantum mechanics. This time, Einstein was mistaken. Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated again and again. In the case of paired photons, entanglement has been demonstrated over distances approaching one hundred miles (for particles with mass, the distances are better described in yards). But it should be noted that entanglement between particles is a fragile affair. The slightest jostling of either entangled particle can destroy the relationship.

  Spooky action at a distance? Freedom from attenuation with distance? A connection that is independent of electromagnetism (and so, the link would be unaffected by EM shielding)? That sure sounds like a candidate mechanism for the paranormal.

  But how?

  Much as Newton felt uneasy about the implications of his model for gravity, scientists continue to argue about the physical significance of the mathematical description that is modern quantum-mechanical theory. 20

  Very briefly, QM is inherently probabilistic. Its math never says, as one example, where an electron
is. Instead, QM enables us to calculate how apt we are to find that electron here, or there, or anywhere else. A time-varying mathematical entity called the "wave function" captures the probability of where the electron might be found.

  Of course, when we do measure an electron's position, it's not here and there and somewhere else—it's in a particular spot.

  The plurality of physicists surveyed say of this dilemma: don't ask. Others speak to the act of measurement as "collapsing the wave function" to the unique location where the electron is observed. Then there is the QM interpretation of immediate relevance. Such prominent physicists as Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann have (at times) asserted the need for a conscious observer to determine the outcome of observations. In this interpretation, the physical universe requires consciousness to operate.

  Combine the nonlocality of quantum entanglement with an intrinsic connection between matter (such as a brain) and consciousness and—voilà—we have a candidate mechanism for the paranormal. Emphasis on candidate. As fascinating as the media find polls, science doesn't operate by ballot. It may nonetheless be worth noting that the conscious-observer approach is far from a leading interpretation of QM. Perhaps because of the chicken-and-egg riddle it would pose regarding brain-made-of-matter and conscious mind. Perhaps because of the riddle it would pose as to the feasibility of matter existing before brains to observe quantum interactions. Perhaps because we don't know what consciousness is....

  Although science has yet to reach any consensus on the underlying meaning of quantum mechanics or the nature of consciousness, mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff propose that consciousness arises from quantum-mechanical effects within submicron intraneuron structures called microtubules. 21

  If that conjecture is valid, then, just maybe, ensembles of microtubules across the brain also cooperate to transmit and receive quantum-entangled particles at longer ranges (i.e., beyond one's own skull). And maybe other ensembles of microtubules in the brain can categorize, manipulate, and otherwise work with the associated data. (To remotely view a designated scene, for example, the subject must have a way to identify and focus upon specific relevant entanglements.) And perhaps eons of evolution developed ways to maintain entangled states over longer times and distances than does the latest human technology.