Notes on Quantum Magic

[dsrtao]

Given:

• that quantum mechanics is all true
  
• that macrophysics is the result of statistical accumulation of quantum effects
  
• that conscious observers are the Hidden Variable
  

then the rules for performing quantum magic must include the idea that the magician can only affect things that no one is paying attention to... including himself, of course.

Comments

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's probably worth noting that the experiment I know of which demonstrated that there might be something to psychokinesis after all relied on QM phenomena. The experiment used a ring of LEDs controlled by a rapid oscillator and a Geiger counter with a lump of something radioactive near it (because they wanted a True Random Number Generator). If an atom decayed while the oscillator was in one state, the lit LED was extinguished and the one immediately clockwise from it was lit. If the oscillator was in the other state, the next LED counterclockwise came on instead.

After encouraging subjects that they could do this and asking them to concentrate on moving the lit LED in a specific direction, they got results that were slightly better than predicted by random chance, but not enough to write an article about. Where it got interesting was when they repeated the experiment with subjects who had been given a discouraging preperatory talk: not only did they perform worse than the first group, but they did significantly worse than chance predicted -- and by enough of a margin to raise eyebrows.

(The power of negative thinking, eh?)

I read about this in Science News sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, I think. On the one hand, someone was paying attention; on the other hand, they were attempting to affect the probabilities of quantum events. A different conclusion than yours is suggested, but the idea that it works by tweaking QM is still in there.