Telekinesis

Telekinesis (from Ancient Greek τηλε- (tēle-) 'far off' and -κίνησις (-kínēsis) 'motion') (alternatively called psychokinesis) is a purported psychic ability allowing an individual to influence a physical system without physical interaction. Simply put, it is the moving or manipulating of objects with the mind, without directly touching them. Experiments to prove the existence of telekinesis have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no reliable evidence that telekinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

Reception

Evaluation There is a broad scientific consensus that telekinetic research has not produced a reliable demonstration of the phenomenon.

A panel commissioned in 1988 by the United States National Research Council to study paranormal claims concluded that:despite a 130-year record of scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or "mind over matter" exercises ... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.In 1984, the National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the US Army Research Institute, formed a scientific panel to assess the best evidence for telekinesis. Part of its purpose was to investigate military applications of telekinesis, for example to remotely jam or disrupt enemy weaponry. The panel heard from a variety of military staff who believed in telekinesis and made visits to the PEAR laboratory and two other laboratories that had claimed positive results from micro-telekinesis experiments. The panel criticized macro-telekinesis experiments for being open to deception by conjurors, and said that virtually all micro-telekinesis experiments "depart from good scientific practice in a variety of ways". Their conclusion, published in a 1987 report, was that there was no scientific evidence for the existence of telekinesis. Carl Sagan included telekinesis in a long list of "offerings of pseudoscience and superstition" which "it would be foolish to accept ... without solid scientific data". Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman advocated a similar position. Felix Planer, a professor of electrical engineering, has written that if telekinesis were real then it would be easy to demonstrate by getting subjects to depress a scale on a sensitive balance, raise the temperature of a waterbath which could be measured with an accuracy of a hundredth of a degree Celsius, or affect an element in an electrical circuit such as a resistor, which could be monitored to better than a millionth of an ampere. Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they "do not hold out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of [telekinesis]" because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent. Planer has written that parapsychologists have to fall back on studies that involve only statistics that are unrepeatable, owing their results to poor experimental methods, recording mistakes and faulty statistical mathematics. According to Planer, "All research in medicine and other sciences would become illusionary, if the existence of [telekinesis] had to be taken seriously; for no experiment could be relied upon to furnish objective results, since all measurements would become falsified to a greater or lesser degree, according to his [telekinetic] ability, by the experimenter's wishes." Planer concluded that the concept of telekinesis is absurd and has no scientific basis. Telekinesis hypotheses have also been considered in a number of contexts outside parapsychological experiments. C. E. M. Hansel has written that a general objection against the claim for the existence of telekinesis is that, if it were a real process, its effects would be expected to manifest in situations in everyday life; but no such effects have been observed. Science writers Martin Gardner and Terence Hines and the philosopher Theodore Schick have written that if telekinesis were possible, one would expect casino incomes to be affected, but the earnings are exactly as the laws of chance predict. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that many experiments in psychology, biology or physics assume that the intentions of the subjects or experimenter do not physically distort the apparatus. Humphrey counts them as implicit replications of telekinesis experiments in which telekinesis fails to appear.

Physics The ideas of telekinesis violates several well-established laws of physics, including the inverse-square law, the second law of thermodynamics, and the conservation of momentum. Because of this, scientists have demanded a high standard of evidence for telekinesis, in line with Marcello Truzzi's dictum "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". The Occam's razor law of parsimony in scientific explanations of phenomena suggests that the explanation of telekinesis in terms of ordinary ways—by trickery, special effects or by poor experimental design—is preferable to accepting that the laws of physics should be rewritten.

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