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Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like bilked bananas
Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 2006 by Robert Sheaffer
At the 87th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Pacific Division at the University of San Diego, June 18-22, there was something very unusual on the program. An entire Technical Symposium, stretched out over three days, was devoted to the subject "Frontiers of Time: Reverse Causation Experiment and Theory." As explained in the abstract, "most physical laws are time-symmetric; that is, they formally and equally admit both time-forward and time-reverse solutions. Time-reverse solutions are distressing because they would allow the future to influence the past.... Experimental evidence for reverse causation is scarce and open to alternative explanations. The best (and perhaps only) evidence comes from parapsychology ..." As in "clairvoyance," "psychokinesis," "remote viewing," etc.
However, anyone expecting to find new and exciting developments in the word of reverse causality would be at least mildly disappointed to find mostly the usual suspects presenting papers--and for the most part trotting out the usual evidence. I didn't hear every presentation, so it's possible I may have missed something important, although the discussion didn't reflect that. Russell Targ, famous for his long-discredited 1970s research at SRI International on the "Geller effect" (see Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus), was hailed by the group like an elder statesman. His colleague Elizabeth Rancher regaled the audience with anecdotes of amazingly successful remote viewing, but from her talk it was impossible to gauge the significance, if any, of the purported successes. She claimed results that were significant to "one chance in half a trillion," but gave no indication how that figure was arrived at, or what precautions were taken against error and fraud. In 1982, Targ and his then-colleague Keith Harary claimed to have had astonishing success using remote viewing to make money investing in silver futures. If the procedure has any validity, by now both should be at least billionaires. But for some reason the venture was discontinued at the height of its success, and Harary ended up suing Targ. Remote viewing seems to be a phenomenon that has been for decades "on the verge" of great success, but somehow never quite gets there.
University of Washington physicist John G. Cramer spoke on "Reverse Causation and the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," which is his new proposal for modeling and understanding quantum phenomena (which he admits cannot be tested, as its predictions are the same as those of quantum mechanics). In it, events have effects both forward and backward in time. He described an experiment using "entangled photons" from a UV laser beam where it may be possible to receive a signal 50 microseconds before it is sent (this scarcely gives the experimenter any time to change his mind and cancel its sending after the signal has been received). The details are in Cramer's talk on his Web site at http://faculty. washington.edu/jcramer.
Roger Nelson described the "Global Consciousness Project" that he established at Princeton University (http:// noosphere.princeton.edu/). The Project has set up a worldwide network of random number generators, fondly known as "eggs," which continuously "flip" virtual "coins." The data has been collected and correlated since 1998. "The purpose of this project is to examine subtle correlations that appear to reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world." He presented data purporting to show that a very large non-randomness in the data, reportedly the largest that his experiment had ever shown, began about four hours before the attacks of September 11, 2001, as if the world's consciousness were crying out in anguish before the hijackers even boarded the airplanes. "This network, which we designed as a metaphoric EEG for the planet, responded as if it were measuring reactions on a planetary scale. We do not know if there is such a thing as a global consciousness, but if there is, it was moved by the events of September 11, 2001. It appears that the coherence and intensity of our common reaction created a sustained pulse of order in the random flow of numbers from our instruments," Nelson writes on his Web site. But he also told the audience about the need to "identify and exclude 'bad trials'" in his methodology, and there is much discussion about these "rotten eggs" on his Web site: "After out-of-bound trials have been removed, the mean and variance of each reg are checked for stability. Sections of reg data that do not pass stability criteria are masked and excluded from analysis.... When the rotten eggs and the out-of-bounds trials are removed, and the data are normalized using the empirical variance for each egg, the resulting curves accurately represent the behavior of true random sources. "An independent analysis of the purported September 11 anomaly by E.C. May and James P. Spottiswoode concluded that "we do not find significant evidence that the GCP networks EGG's responded to the New York City attacks in real time. [Dean] Radin's computation of 6000:1 odds against chance during the events are accounted for by a not-unexpected local deviation that occurred approximately three hours before the attacks. We conclude that the network random number generators produced data consistent with mean chance expectation during the worst single day tragedy in American history." (Spottiswoode was at the symposium, but was not a speaker.)
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