...on an on-screen QWERTY keyboard. I suppose interface wasn't a priority.

Applicant(s): Pear, Inc., St. Paul, MN

If article posts could be moderated, this one would be moderated down as far as possible. As far as mind reading and perpetual motion patents go, this is one of the more obviously rediculous. It is an example of the allowance of pretty much any "explanatory" content in the specification (in this case pseudo-QM) no matter how little sense it makes.

The truth does not set you free, it just makes everyone irratable. Your mother lied to you.

It's great as the premise for an SF novel (and it is a really good novel); but it's bogus in real life.

The way a particle changes when observed is that you have to bounce a photon or electron of it, (or whatever your microscope is using), in order for a signal to come back to your eye.

And OF COURSE bouncing an electron off a particle is going to affect its state.

There's no mystery to it. It's not magic.

Like I said, either I'm a total heathen, or 90% of the world is foolishly treating quantum mechanics like the second coming.

Get a grip.

-Garund

Yup, at best, giving them the benefit of the doubt (quite a stretch) this would have to be placed in the "highly speculative" file, maybe tucked in just behind the Rupert Sheldrake file.

If someone does claim to measure a particle produced by consciousness, I vote we name it the "bogon". Or maybe we could refer to the whole thing as the GSSG Effect (Grad Students Sniffing Glue).

I keep hearing about particles which seemingly appear and disappear in an impossible manner. I've read science fiction short stories about this and all the amazing technologies and possibilities which come along after you make the basic assumption that particles can perform magic tricks of this nature.

So my question is this: Are these effects real, or are they simply products of the math used to track particles? (i.e., QM math works in averages and percent possibilities of particles being in one place at one time. Thus, sometimes QM states that a particle has ‘vanished' or is in ‘many places at once.' –And the uninitiated student reads this as though the particle has actually performed the impossible.)

Is the impossible actually happening, or are there just a lot of science students looking for munchkins in their wardrobes?

Please tell me more. If magic exists, I'd be happy, but I have my doubts.

-Garund

So. . . based on this, (and those light box experiments somebody else mentioned which show both the wave and particle behavior in light), would it be logical to assume that all particles are just a convenient/temporarily stable manifestation of basic energy, and that everything in existence is simply a result of this essential nature of ‘matter'?

-Garund

The way a particle changes when observed is that you have to bounce a photon or electron of it, (or whatever your microscope is using), in order for a signal to come back to your eye.

And OF COURSE bouncing an electron off a particle is going to affect its state.

Secondly, the point is not that "something happens" (which your theory would explain) but that something entirely different happens each time and that there is no testable reason for this difference outside of the observer.

========
+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++

It's more than that.

Take double-slit diffraction experiment. The slits are of comperable width to the wavelength of a photon. Fire a beam of photons through the two holes. They produce an interference pattern.

Place a sensitive detector where the target screen is. Now you can detect individual photons, and you can detect where they hit.

Now take a source of photons which though somewhat random would be just as likely to spew a photon through one slit or the other. It's not that hard to produce, nor is it terribly critical for the experiment. The key point is that rate of photons coming out can be controlled.

Slow down the source and watch the pattern. lots of interference... turn it down more... still lots of interference.

What happens when only single photons are going through? One would expect a simple non-interfering diffraction pattern right? After all, singular photons are going through the slit, how could they possibly interfere with one another?

The pattern is that of interference. Peculiar isn't it? Which hole did the photon go through?

As soon as you attempt to observe the hole which the photon goes through... you have a non-interfering diffraction pattern. It has nothing to do with the fact that photons are bouncing off eachother or that the mechanism of detection is affecting the experiment. The pattern on your detection screen is for the particles which you did not interfere with.

This has been scrutinized very carefully by many very meticulous people. If you doubt the results, pick up a book by a reputable author or publisher and read about it. There are practial applications of these results, and the same properties were found for electrons. There is more evidence that the results are not propreties specific to photons or electrons, though I have not read it personally and cannot comment on it.

Example: According to something I've read somewhere and believe (I think it was in a Dilbert book, but hey, I trust Scott Adams), you still get the interference pattern if you turn the detector on but instruct it to throw away its data instead of sending it anywhere -- this is what discredits the hypothesis that the detector beam interacts somehow with the electrons.

What's always bothered me about this (and Schroedinger's Cat, which was made up to illustrate exactly this point, I guess) is the messiness that goes with it. What if the scientists just don't look at the detector? What if the detector, instead of throwing the data away, XORs it with an unknown bit and outputs the encrypted data? Does the pattern change depending on who in the room knows what the unknown bit is? What if the detector has audio output, but the scientist is deaf?

If you build a QM burglar alarm that rings when it's observed, and the burglar who glances at it is unobserved by you, does he count as an observer from your viewpoint, or does he become part of the wave-equation, like Schroedinger's cat? Does the alarm ever ring when you're not around?

This is basically correct. Measurement collapses a wave into a particle, and the mechanism of measurement is quantum electrodynamics.

There can be electrodynamic interaction without measurement, however. A wave can travel through a crystal or a fiber-optic cable, and be modified by electrodynamic interaction, without collapsing into a particle state.

If measurement depended on human consciousness, how would we ever have particle-like behavior? When a light wave falls in the forest, it is "measured" by the trees, which turn the wave into a particle and take its energy from it, even if no human being is around.

When a wave goes through a crystal without collapsing, however, it generates no heat. When a laser goes through a crystal, the crystal heats up because some of the waves collapse and become particles. The waves that go through may interact with the electrons in the crystal, but they leave no trace. If they left a trace, we would have measured them.

It also is possible to turn a wave into a particle and then into a wave again. But none of this has any grand philosophical implications.

Measurements are special, but human beings are not.

Your description of lasers through crystals was the first instance of anybody clearly explaining the whole 'wave collapse' thing.

To me, anyway.

Thanks!

This .sig is here to make you think, "Him again?"

You are thinking on very elementary terms, my friend.

You wouldn't will the mouse to move-- there would be no need for a mouse, or a cursor. Second, there would be no need for such childish thing as bash prompts-- instead you would just think of what you want done and the computer will do it.. (i.e., How many times does the letter e appear after the letters R, S or T in all of my text files beginning with the letter Q).

And if they ever perfect the reverse--- controlling your thoughts via quantum states-- you wouldn't even need a monitor. You could actually READ AN ENTIRE KATZ article in one day!

Juicy Cranberries!

The truth does not set you free, it just makes everyone irratable. Your mother lied to you.

Nice try though.

I appear to have passed into the Anal-Resentive stage of my life . . .

--The basis of all love is respect

no fun - no future - no sig.

How so? This seems counter-intuitive, but then again so do a lot of things in relativity, so if you could point me to a URL with a more detailed explanation I'd appreciate it. Here's what my intuition says: say I were on the moon and I was observing events down on earth. If I were watching them through a telescope there would be a delay of about a second or two between the events occuring and me seing them due to the time it takes light to travel that far. Now if there were some way for me to observe the events half a second sooner the information would be travelling to me faster than the speed of light, but it's still well after the events happened. I don't understand how I could have a chance to change the original event.

Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid has a discussion of this issue. (If you haven't read it yet, do so.)

He discusses this in terms of envelopes and inner messages. If I hand you a vinyl record, what is the message? You could use the record as a plate for eating from, but that's clearly not the message I was trying to give. If your understanding is a little better, you'll know that the record is a sound recording, and you'll be able to play it back. But you might not know how fast to rotate the disc, so your hearing may be at a lower or higher speed/pitch than the recording was made. Once you actually hear the sounds, there's another layer of meaning. Let's assume the record contains only human speech. It might be in a language you recognize, or it might not. You'd have to decode the langauge first, to translate the sounds into symbols (words). Then, finally you get to the innermost meaning -- the significance of the words. If the words are a poem or similarly complex communication, then simply understanding the individual words may not be enough to give you a full understanding of the communication. You'd have to be able to put the words together in the appropriate context; in other words, you'd have to be able to share some insight with the person who wrote the poem.

Imagine a poem from a hypothetical alien creature who lives on a gas giant. Perhaps the poet is eloquently singing the praises of a particularly rich methane stream. Even if you understood the individual words, would you necessarily be able to understand what the poet is talking about? We can't see or smell methane gas, after all -- so what reference points would we have in interpreting the words of a creature who can?

However, even if we fail to decode all the layers of meaning of any given communication, we still gain some understanding even from the physical envelope itself. In the case of a record, we know that there is someone out there who is capable of communcation; that this person can produce sound; that this person can engrave an analog version of these sounds into vinyl; that this person can then deliver a vinyl record over long distances; etc.

This is a bit incoherent (sorry), but I hope you get the point. And that you read the book -- it's much better than my poor little /. post would indicate. :-)

The SETI project finally received a signal from another star...but it must be interpreted. The government puts together a top secret group to work on deciphering it...mathematicians, philosophers, physicists, biologists...there seems to be no good theory as to what it means, and there are some questions that have to be answered about the alien intelligence that sent the message. If they are friendly they must have known that anybody who received the message would get it long after they themselves are dead. If they are not friendly, should the message even be deciphered?

A great sci-fi story that poses some great questions about the philosophy of science and about the limitations of human intelligence.

This bugged the heck out of Einstein ("spooky action at a distance"), and I suspect if the answer was as simple as the balls and socks analogy, someone would have pointed that out to him if he didn't figure it out himself!

First of all, my understanding of the experiment that proves the existence of a wave function is that a stream of particles passes through an "up polarity" filter and then a "down polarity" filter (something like that). If the filters are close together or the stream of particles is being observed (ie, light shining on them) nothing comes out the second filter because up and down are the only possible polarities, so each particle was filtered out by one of the filters. However, if you turn off the lights and spread out the filters, some particles do make it through both filters.

That said, I'm thinking you should be able to set up an experiment where a stream of particles is split into stream A and stream B where all (or most) of the particles in stream A are the entagled particles of stream B.
Stream A goes "north" and stream B goes "south". At X units away from the source stream A hits an "up polarity" filter. At X+Y units away it hits a "down polarity" filter. Stream B simply has a light switch which can shine a light on stream B for a span which streches from X to X+Y units away from the source.
Now I would think that when that light is on for stream B, nothing from stream A will get through the filters. When that light is off, some particles in stream A would make it through both filters.

What's wrong with this!? Even if I have misunderstood the original experiment, there must be *some* way to verify that a stream of particles has a wave function, otherwise, why do we believe in wave functions!? And if we can verify the existence of a wave function, we should be able to determine if it has broken down or not. Could this determination not be used to transfer 1 bit of information!?

In the decades since that 10% number appeared, a few more things have been learned:

• Children have many more neurons than their brains tend to have later. Many neurons die during childhood. So 10% measured when? And before or after they're organized to become more "efficient"?
• New neurons are being constantly created, even in adults humans. So any measurement is temporary, as we don't know what parts of the brain may become activated by new connections and learning.
• While awake, every vertebrate brain uses energy faster than the bloodstream can deliver it. Your brain functions differently when it starts running low of energy -- things start malfunctioning and different parts of the brain activate to try to compensate.

If (BIG if) that other portion of the brain is being used to affect things at the quantum level, that would appear to have considerable survival value to me. A better chance of tracking prey, finding ripe fruit, noticing that the observations of a predator are collapsing some of your quantum wavicles, all potentially have survival value.

Come on, everyone that's ever seen military action has known someone who just had an 'instinct' that they were being watched - even if it was through a sniper scope miles away.

I appear to have passed into the Anal-Resentive stage of my life . . .

--

perl -e 'print pack"H*","62656e6a69406d696e64737072696e672e636f6d0a"'

I suggest using the part of the brain responsible for politics.
Glen Murphy
riot.com.au

Why average guy? Becuase it is a QM effect. QM is everywhere, and why should one persons brain be any different when it comes to something very coarse like producing distortions in TV tubes?

Maybe you say that only some people with special brains can do it. Sorry, but then that is already saying more than originally posited. You are saying that (i) electrons can be affected by minds (ii) only some minds can do it, the average one cannot. In an experiment, then you would have to check for both of these effects. So far, I have never heard of people trying to isolate one effect from the other.

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Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

While I'm skeptical about the PEAR results, I've got to come down on the side of accuracy here...

---
Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton

(I once was "Ungrounded Lightning Rod" but slashdot slashed off my " Rod". Is that why they call Linux a "Unix workalike"?)

I suspect it could be used to note whether someone actively intended to do something to a specific item (i.e. blow up this plane), but I don't think it could be used in the more general sense (Someone intends to rob a bank, somewhere . . .) As far as something used to alter and control thoughts, well - those already exist. They're called women . . .

I appear to have passed into the Anal-Resentive stage of my life . . .

1) After giving the PEAR and IBM patent sites a quick read, it is not clear to me that anyone involved is prepared to claim that the influences that these folks have observed of human observers on mechanical systems have anything to do with quantum effects. That is not to say that they are not doing valid science, but rather that they do not seem to have a clear explanation for the effects they are reporting. They are reporting observations of effects that may have applications (with our without explanations) in human-machine interfacing. This is how lots of applied science, particularly medical research, is done.

2) The physics community is by no means certain as to whether inanimate apparati such as computer driven data acquisition systems are or are not observers. That is, physicists do not agree on whether you have to be conscious to be an observer. In fact, it is unclear that this is a question that can be answered.

3) The current theoretical understanding of quantum entanglement, backed up by a host of experimental observations, holds that it is not possible to construct an instantaneous (faster than light speed) communication device with these systems. That is, the data at both ends of long path length quantum entanglement experiments is correlated event by event, but the observers at both ends do not control the character of the data. (Try designing an experiment that would settle the question.)

Those interested in understanding quantum entanglement experiments should read a great (15 year old) article that gives a clear, accessible introduction to the area:

N. David Mermin, "Is the moon there when nobody looks? Reality and the Quantum Theory," Physics Today, April 1985.

If anyone saw Chicago Hope this Wednesday (Thursday in the US, I think), this story probably made them think of that episode. Essentially, a man with muscle paralysis so severe that he could not speak, had sensors implanted into his brain, so that he could speak by thinking about words and letters and having the computer spell them out.

One of the first things the man said once he learned how to "speak" using the machine, was "Kill me. Let me die. Please, Please".

Why am I talking about this? I dunno, really. Just a spooky coincidence about the news release coming so soon after the show.

- Drew "hanemusume wo sagashiteru" Hamilton

PEAR sometimes makes the news, and there are usually some engineers around to say what's wrong with the experiments, so I'll leave that to them. I think the main problem is that their work is almost by definition not reproducible.

I know this is just an argument from authority, and PEAR supporters will say "But every major scientific advance has been laughed at when first discovered." True enough. Unfortunately, for every one of those, millions and millions of stupid or false ideasn have been laughed at too, and with good reason. So take it with a small salt mine.

...actually examined that data at any length...

I think PEAR's claims are shaky and unlikely to be true. What "observation" means in QM is still an open question, but it seems unlikely that it is anything tied particularly to human perception (although early physicists seemed to think so). If IBM's funding will contribute to resolving this question, all the better.

All we need are electrode implants in the brain, plus some way of intgerfacing, making sure thet this is completely safe. That's a mind-input device. Why employ all of this complicated statistical effects that is so hard to detect, and so obscure to harness?

True, we still have a long way to go in making such human brain/electronic devices reality. There are so many issues involved in doing something like that. But at least this sounds more promising than pseudoscientific balderdash about spooky QM!

(Sorry for getting further off topic). Actually this has already been done. It has come up a few different times here at /. One mention involved external sensors without brain implants:

http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/14/1538227.shtml

I guess this is still very experimental, but they have certainly been putting sensors with radio transmitters in the brains of paraplegics for a while now. I believe a lot of this is being done at Case Western. It allows the person to control his/her environment. With little motors in things like the doors and windows, and having all the lights wired into the system, it goes a long way toward increasing the self sufficiency of paralyzed people. All you need to do is be able to choose between two options, and then you can scroll through menus, etc.

Does anyone have any links for this?

The effect you describe is exactly like taking a pair of cards, one red, the other green and sealing each in an envelope while blindfolded. Then you mail one to yourself and the other to your friend. Once you see that you have a red card, you know immmediately that your friend has a green one. But the cards themselves have not travelled faster than light!

In the real spin +1/2 and -1/2 case, it is the fact that you have no control over whether you get the +1/2 or -1/2 that prevents any signal from propagating from you to him. All you can do is note whether you have a +1/2 or -1/2. You have no way of choosing which to send.

The effect you describe is exactly like taking a pair of cards, one red, the other green and sealing each in an envelope while blindfolded... it is the fact that you have no control over whether you get the +1/2 or -1/2 that prevents any signal from propagating from you to him.

Ummmmm... actually, it's not "exactly" like that. Go back to the case of the interference slit experiments: what happens is that the system is in both states (a superposition of the states) until and unless an attempt is made to determine which state some component is in. At that point, each component of the system assumes a single state, all of which are consistent with each other -- regardless of their spatial separation at that time. It's as though both cards are red and green at the same time, until you look at yours -- which is not at all the same as what you've laid out, which is merely lack of knowledge about the state of your card; in fact, the state of your card is indeterminate until you open the envelope.

You can argue the meaning of "signal," but the demonstrated physical fact is that there is an apparently-instantaneous communication of some sort between the entangled wavefunctions. Your perceived inability to influence the outcome is independent of that.

What's interesting about PEAR's results, is that they seem to be saying that we indeed have an ability to influence the outcome. This is difficult for me to believe, but then most of QM is pretty difficult for me to get my mind around... given the counter-intuitive (but still consistent) results of the experimental outcomes to date, I really don't feel like saying that such-and-such is impossible.

---
Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton

For example, I could say that the it is either (-1/2,+1/2) for an entangled electron pair or (+1/2,-1/2). Probability half of either. That would be a classical but fair way to decribe the system. No QM is necessary to describe this situation. This is exactly like the envelope models.

The thing about QM is this. The probabilities don't add. It is the complex amplitudes which add. This is why the two possibilities can be described by using only one wavefunction. This is also why sometimes, amplitudes can add, but the probabilities go down. Plus the mysterious idea that you can only measure one component of the spin simultaneously, wherein all the knowledge of the other components are gone.

But you are right about the ability to control the outcome. I was not thinking clearly. Even if you could control the outcome, this would not mean that a signal can be transmitted.

It is exactly like that, except that you have 3 axes about which to resolve the spin of an electron. The statement that each electron is in both states is precisely why it is misleading to laymen.

I disagree -- it's simply not "exactly like that." The reason it's confusing to laymen is precisely the same reason it's confusing to physicists: QM is counter-intuitive, and not consistent with our macroscopic experience. Formally, in QM each electron is in "both states at the same time" -- the superposition of the two "observable" wavefunctions. This may be confusing, but it's what the mathematics says.

...That would be a classical but fair way to decribe the system. No QM is necessary to describe this situation. This is exactly like the envelope models.

There is no way you can use classical descriptions of the system to correctly predict the outcome of, for example, the interference slit experiment. The difference is that the "unobserved" QM system displays a different outcome (interference fringes) from the "observed" system (discrete spots), while the classical system of your cards hidden in envelopes displays the same, unchanging outcome -- whether you know the outcome or not. These two aren't symmetrical descriptions!

...Even if you could control the outcome, this would not mean that a signal can be transmitted.

I don't follow this: if you can control the outcome, you control not only the state of the local electron but also the state of the remote, entangled one. How is this not transmitting a signal? (I admit that there are tremendous problems with causality if you can do this, which is why I have problems with it -- but that's a different issue.)

---
Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton

[Brain overload. Core dumped.]
--

Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

When I was a child, I did childish things. I still do.

"These random devices also respond to group activities of larger numbers of people, even when they are unaware of the machine's presence. ... Venues that appear to be particularly conducive to such field anomalies include small intimate groups, group rituals, sacred sites, musical and theatrical performances, and charismatic events. In contrast, data generated during academic conferences or business meetings show no deviations from chance."

Unfortunately you can't attribute the field anomalies to mass hysteria due to the lack of them at academic conferences and business meetings any more.:-)

But seriously, when I saw the part about group activity, group rituals, sacred sites, et cetera, I immediately thought about something I read a couple of years ago about some experiment some doctor in California did with prayer groups praying for sick people that they didn't know, that didn't know that they were being prayed for, where those patients did better than a control group. Maybe prayer works with or without God.

As someone with a relative experiencing increasing "packet loss" between legs and brain (myelin sheath deterioration), I'm wondering if there's any "routing around the spinal cord" application this could be part of.

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My own work in this area leads me to believe there is some profound sense in or extent to which we can control our own identity, thereby becoming in touch with things outside our bodies. Any good technologist knows the feeling of really identifying with his tools and materials and understands how profoundly that affects the creative process. There is a point where one shifts one's thinking from "I want this thing to do that." and toward thinking "What can I do with this thing?" That is at a boundary between identities where the creative technologist and the psychic have more in common than either currently realizes.

Are we suppose to give IBM credit for every patent in their database?

"Experimental result X is impossible according to theory Y, therefore the experiment is so obviously in error that we need not even consider the possibility that the theory is incomplete."

With a well established, well tested theory, making decisions about how to allocate resources for research should probably take into account whether the dominant theory precludes the possibility of the result.

Once the research has been completed, making decision about how much of one's personal time to spend investigating the results should probably take such considerations into account as well.

Given the number of genuine cranks out there, this is just common sense. BUT: Don't let these pragmatic considerations become a dogmatic acceptance of the intrinsic validity of the theory in question! If an experiment contradicts the theory, then either the experiment was flawed, or the theory was wrong. I don't have the physics credentials (or more importantly than the credentials, the skills) necesary to judge this particular case, but there does exist the possibility that the theories making up your physics worldview and intuition are WRONG. It makes sense to develop standards by which to avoid throwing out a useful theoretical framework at the drop of a hat, but there seems to be a lot of "GR says X is impossible, so if you've demonstrated X there is no conceivable possibility other than that you didn't really demonstrate X". That argument may be useful in filtering out cranks, but it also means you've elevated GR from the level of falsifiable theory to Dogma from On High--the antithesis of what science is supposed to be about.

For example, there was an off-the-shelf "mind mouse" available in computer stores in the US a few years ago. It worked off a finger sensor, and the store demos used a skiing game in which you could move a character left or right by thinking. However, the demo was such that it was difficult to tell when you were actually making a difference. It appeared to sort of work sometimes, but for all I know it could have been a total scam.

But the hypothesis behind this patent is rather different, since it not only implies a way to perform such control without wires at some distance, but if valid (which I seriously doubt) would have some interesting implications for physics and our understanding of the universe.

Even if their hypothesis *is* valid, though, it's even less likely that it would ever result in usable control devices, given the demonstrated unreliability of direct electrical hookups.

Einstein turned out to be provably wrong on this, because (As I understand it - IANAP) the hidden variable hypothesis doesn't allow for the double slit experiment, in which you get dual wave/particle interactions depending on the presence on an observer.

As always, Noone is quite what constitutes an observer, because no-one has been able to get a 'non-observer' to say what the wavicle looks like to it. Grin

I appear to have passed into the Anal-Resentive stage of my life . . .

The probability states of the said particles tend to bulge in such a way that the average positition (or something like that) doesn't violate relativity.
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Exactly. I don't see how the possibility of something like this could have so many people not only skeptical, but completely against the entrie project. I'm no physics genius, but this sounds like something well worth looking into, BS or not.

"As long as the machines don't start controling me..."
Tokerat out. +++ATH0

33.Wishing for Good Weather: A Natural Experiment in Group Consciousness. J. Scientific Exploration, 11, No. 1, pp. 47-58, 1997.*

41.Toward a Philosophy of Science in Women's Health Research. J. Scientific Exploration, 10, No. 4, pp. 535-545, 1996.

38.FieldREG Measurements in Egypt: Resonant Consciousness at Sacred Sites. Tech. Note 97002, July 1997 (36 pages). [Human/Machine]

If that is science, I better start learning spiritualism so I can talk to the spirits of the dead.

concentration

Hmmm. And how exactly do you know that? Did you observe in some scientific text that someone observered via various interpretations of observing light from the sky that the universe was here before us?

As a note, I'm a skeptic of all this myself, but we seem pretty certain that our observations are stronger than our observations... don't we :)

Ok, let's suppose the people at Pear. inc are crackpots. but how can you guys be so sure that telekinesis is impossible? I am no expert in physics. but one thing I can say for certain is we definitely DON'T know everything yet. yes, QM, relativity, Newtonian Physics are quite reliable so far. but they are not perfect. even if everyone doing research in fringe sciences are crackpots, that doesn't prove whether something is impossible. the equations in our physics textbooks says antigravity and cold fusion are impossible. well, if einstein and planck had relied on their textbooks back then, we would never have relativity and QM. my point here is that there can never be progress unless somebody comes up with a radical point of view. sadly, people in the scientific community rarely dares to deviate from the status quo. nobody likes to be called a crackpot and nobody likes his/her funding be cut off.

>Kaphka is right, the only connection to IBM is that the patent record appears in IBM's database. The patent belongs to PEAR, Inc., a Minnesota corporation.

I have to question the patent, however. I mean, to get a patent, you have to have a working prototype. But rather than a device using quantum principles as a mind-control input device, Pear, Inc., would appear to have a softward application which lets the user train exercise his/her psionic powers by wishing a certain trend in the output of a randomly-generated signal from the application. A game, more or less.

I'd be interested in seeing what Pear, Inc. has to say about itself, but the corporate website isn't responding. Slashdotted?

Looking over the Princeton PEAR site, the research they describe there strikes me as very similar to that which friends of mine have participated in at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. The PEAR folks describe their work in the terminology of science and quantum mechanics. The Rhine folks are just call it psychokinesis.

Dr. J.B. Rhine started his research into paranormal phenomena at Duke University in the 1920s. Rhine's research applied scientific methods to the question of whether ESP and psychokinesis did in fact exist -- he coined the term "extrasensory perception" or "ESP" -- and tried to find out how such things worked. Eventually Duke got concerned about their public image and, in the early 60s, ran Rhine out of the University. Unperturbed, he moved his lab to a building directly across the street from Duke (where it remains to this day). His institute is continuing the research long after Rhine's death.

I don't begrudge continued academic research into "paranormal" phenomena -- in fact, I think mainstream-style research methods are the only way to go when examining whether ESP and psychokinesis exist. But I do find it ironic and humorous that image-conscious Duke University threw J.D. Rhine out for doing the same work which continues -- in another guise -- under the official sanction and aegis of Princeton University. (Dookies know another shade of irony, that the architecture of Duke's main campus was modeled after Princeton.)

In high school, the explanation I got was that if you try and measure the position of an electron you have to bounce photons off of it. So you get a good measurement of the position. However, you get a crummy measurement of the momentum because bouncing photons off the electron changed its momentum. This is an interesting interpretation but it is wrong!

I wrote a semi-technical explanation of the Uncertainty Principle for a friend of mine a while ago and posted it on my web site at http://www.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU/~emin/writings/quantum_ind.html in case anyone is interested. The explanation is available in PDF and HTML. To understand the explanation you need a basic idea of what integrals and derivatives are but you don't need to remember how to calculate them.

-Emin Martinian

Sig(s) previously appearing in this space temporarily removed for maintenance

• You are presented with one box after another.
• To input a one bit, observe a live cat in the box.
• To input a zero bit, observe a dead cat in the box.
• This sequence lets you create input to the computer very simply, and the computer only has to observe the resulting state of the cats.

In other words, until we 'observe' it, it's a
wave, and can split and interfere with
itself. When we quantize it and observe it,
we collapse the wave function, and get a particle.

I wonder, if you have two people watching the experiment, let's say person A and B, if person A observes the photon, could it be that person B would still experience an interference pattern?

If person A does not tell person B him about the state?

/Jorgen

(I once was "Ungrounded Lightning Rod" but slashdot slashed off my " Rod". Is that why they call Linux a "Unix workalike"?)