Thread dug up by noobie. However, that document (it's still there!) is typical of every demonstration of paranormal powers. Everybody knows what they would like to see demonstrated by psychokinesis, telekinesis, whatever you want to call it. What they would like to see is what we see in the movies - someone concentrates on a spoon, and it "magically" bends in the middle. But, disappointment as ever. Here the subject actually has to take hold of both ends of the spoon! As to whether people who follow the instructions succeed in deluding themselves that they are actually bending a spoon with their minds rather than their bodies, any impartial observer will inevitably note the fact that fingers are in contact in such a way as to naturally be able to bend the spoon. I'm reminded of when I was promised I would see a film in which ayurvedic yogis actually levitated during transcendental meditation. But in fact, when you see the film, this "levitation" consists of bouncing forwards on your bum with your crossed legs giving the impetus, on cushions. Which ain't what I call levitation. The other issue this raises is a very common problem that somehow everybody completely misses in dealing with the paranormal. After all, why is fork bending such a big thing in it? Why is there an instruction manual on how to bend a fork with your mind? After all, what exactly is the point of that? You take a perfectly good implement and render it useless! Instead, why not give instructions telling you how to dispense with forks altogether, and TK the food right into your mouth? Surely compared to bending solid metal, moving light objects around should be relatively easy? The answer of course is that cutlery bending was introduced by Uri Geller as a trick he could do very well. Nicholas Humphrey in Soul Searching (1995) in being a little critical of James Randi's methodology of debunking said that he had seen both Randi and Geller perform spoon bending at very close quarters, and of course Geller was much better at it. He did, after all, invent it, and is undoubtedly the best in the world at the trick. Humphrey incidentally is quite sure that Geller knows when he's performing illusions, but does have some genuine belief in his own powers - he even hinted at a source for that, saying that Geller's agent might well "arrange" for stuff to happen. Humphrey himself prepared an El-Al airline fork for Uri to bend (Geller is an Israeli), and Uri immediately pounced on it as the kind of coincidence that always happens to him. So as to whether he truly believes in the paranormal while obviously helping it along with his illusionism, the jury is out.
so something that cant be measured at this exact moment of time doesnt exist? interesting......so.......back in the 1300's, radio waves didnt exist simply because we had no way to quantify or measure them? give me a break.
Thats not what was said. All energy is on the electromagnetic spectrum. Now if you claim a form of energy that we have not discovered that can move objects or bend them about etc is waiting to be discovered, then all i am asking is where it will fit into the electromagnetic spectrum. By your statments you are debunking all known laws of physics, we may as well forget any law that has been produced. By flippantly stating that it must exist , and that as it has not been dicovered its the fault of every scientist and that your position is correct is frankly stupid. Read a physics 101 textbook, and come back to me. If you read it properly i think your stance on the subject will change.
actually, it IS what was said. i said that just because something cannot be quantified, that does not disprove all possibility of existence. in the 1300's, barely any of the kinds of energy we know of today could be measured or quantified (i love that word). so by the same logic, just because we cant measure this energy at this specific time, you are saying that it cannot possibly exist. our "known" laws of existence have always been wrong. YOU should read a physics book, and THEN read one from 300 years ago. how different are they? but those people in the past certainly thought THEIR rules were absolute as well.
Perhaps we should wait until someone is actually able to display these powers before trying to explain it scientifically...
This is indeed the precise problem. Psychic effects do not show up in repeatable, controlled experiments with sufficient measurable effect. Where effects have been shown the experiment is shown to be not controlled in the way that it should. To go back to Humphrey's Soul Searching, he quoted a survey of paranormal investigators who were asked to agree or disagree with the statement "The presence of paranormal effects is so profoundly established that any further research just to determine whether there is such an effect or not is uninteresting research".70% of those surveyed agreed with that statement. And yet.... Let's talk about a different "mysterious energy". Wilhelm Röntgen doing some unimportant experiments which involved the fluorescing of different elements when exposed to light, discovered that stuff fluoresced in another room when his machine was on. There was an unknown form of energy being emanated by his apparatus that would excite atoms to fluoresce. When asked later by a pressman what he had thought upon making these discoveries, he said "I didn't think. I experimented." Over the succeeding weeks he determined the kind of material the radiation could pass through and what it couldn't, and how much the effect attenuated over distance. Later experimenters (the Braggs, specifically) were able to devise methods to diffract the radiation which showed it to be an electromagnetic wave. The radiation was first named, because it was an "unknown", X-Rays - which title they have ironically retained. This is the kind of experimental data we would hope to be seeing if paranormal phenomena were really "established beyond all doubt". What the survey actually shows is that people who work in the field are actually more inclined to see a "Yes" result than is actually justified by rigorous scientific standards.
