science-fiction or science-fact?
Just when does science not only meet fiction, but become more extraordinary than science-fiction?
You might want to read this article and decide for yourself:
"One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.
The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.
During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.
According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happened - but it did. And it kept on happening."
posted by Wayne Smallman at Monday, February 14, 2005
3 Comments:
My mum has a very simple answer to the big philosophical conundrum of why the fuck we're all here. She thinks human beings' role in life is to create the next level of evolution - computers. Once we have perfected AI we'll be obsolete she reckons. And when I read things like this I realise with a bit of a shiver that we're pretty close.
I think it's well odd.
Maybe your mum is right, Zuzula. But at least if we figure out how to use these little black boxes, we might see the machines coming to get us!
And you of all people Lucretia, I thought it'd be right up your street
I've never actually tried Absinthe, though I've seen what it does to a 16 year-old friend of my nephew...
I've covered this topic before. I've read from the perspective of the nay-sayers, de-bunkers and the skeptics and they've got no credible answer as to what's going on.
The results are available for all to see, and anyone can do their own experiments with the dirt-cheap gear involved.
There's precious little to dispute.
Plus, I'm willing to defer to the better knowledge of the seventy-five scientists hanging their collective careers in the balance on the strength of their belief in this...
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