A few years ago, I and several others, watched glass tumbler spontaneously move a great distance without any apparent external or internal means of propulsion. I made an immediate examination of the object, and found it to be un-tampered-with. Due to the circumstances, the likelihood of trickery, while still more convincing than that of the event being paranormal, is, as far as I am concerned, only very slightly more likely.
Before I go on, let me attempt some definitions: I am a skeptic, but, I like to think, an open-minded skeptic. What I and my friends saw was inexplicable - to me, anyway. Thus, I would describe it as supernatural or paranormal, in that the event was outside the scope of my current understanding of “nature”. I am not claiming or suggesting, however, that it was occult or spiritual.
From everything I’ve read, the scientific “research” (most of it pretty shoddy, in my observation) into such phenomena starts from the ground up: attempting to find out if the phenomena actually exist. However, is there any theoretical research going on? Such phenomena have been described by a great many reliable sources: are we all mistaken? (BTW, I’m not saying we’re not). Should such anecdotal evidence be justification for theoretical research? Or to put it another way, if (and a big IF) there was suddenly clear and repeatable evidence of such phenomena, are there any current credible theories that might suggest a physical mechanism? If so, what are they? If not, is this simply due to a lack of empirical evidence as a starting point (and that there are more important things to think about)?
Did you record it? What could have moved it? A ghost, why? Was one of your friends trying out TP? What is a great distance?
IF it actually happened, and I am not calling you a liar, and you did not fall prey to undeliberate confabulation, there still could many scientific reasons it occured. (Human memory is shown in many studies to be extremely unreliable) A tumbler sitting with it’s rim on the table/ground, could, due to an air pressure change, move. I have only seen it with a glass that was wet though. A tumbler falling off a bookshelp moved a great distance by itself. A small vibration of a truck passing by, undetectable to human sense, could have knocked it over the edge. I could think of a couple more, less reasonble sounding theories, and I am not even a very educated, intelligent individual. There are alot of obscure physical mechanisms that cause wierd things, which are credited to the supernatural by those that are not aware of them. Simple reasoning and reenactment generally show that the emotions clouded the logic. (or it could be that the excitment of your friends convinced you of something you would have dismissed as odd, yet natural)
I suspect that no one’s doing any theoretical research because no one has ever demonstrated a paranormal phenomenon that actually needs an explanation. If you’ve never visited the site maintained by James Randi, you should spend some time perusing it. In brief, Randi offers a million dollar prize to anyone who can demonstrate any paranormal abilities or phenomena under controlled conditions. The prize money has gone begging for years.
Epimetheus I’m not asking what could have caused it - I’ve eliminated all the suggestions you’ve come up with, bar a conjuring trick. As my second paragraph indicates I don’t think it was a “ghost” or TP. The final paragraph is the question - are there any credible theories around?
Early Out, James Randi is a hero of mine, but he really only targets allegedly human-derived phenomena. I’m asking about other stuff. Though your supposition is similar to my musing re. lack of evidence.
What kind of tumbler?
What kind of surface?
How far and how fast did it move?
Which way up was it?
How did it it move? (slide or roll?)
Was there loud music playing at the time?
What made you notice the movement? (did you see it begin to move, or did you only notice it once it was in motion?)
M. Mangetout, I refer you to my reply to Epimetheus - that’s not the question I’m asking.
Having said that, since the question’s been asked twice, I may as well go into it:
**What kind of tumbler? **
Heavy glass - “whiskey” type. What kind of surface?
Dry, textured kitchen work surface.
**How far and how fast did it move? **
About 8 feet. As if someone had shoved it quite hard. It came to rest very quickly, just before it hit the sink.
**Which way up was it? **
Upside down.
**How did it it move? (slide or roll?) **
Slid.
**Was there loud music playing at the time? **
No, the house was silent. It was in County Cork, miles away from the nearest conurbation, so no trucks or the like. What made you notice the movement? (did you see it begin to move, or did you only notice it once it was in motion?)
There were six of us in the room, sitting round a table, which was about 10 feet from the work surface. I was facing the direction of the work surface, as were two others. I caught the beginning of the movement in my peripheral vision, flicked my eyes to it and said “look!”. The two people facing the work surface also reacted in the same manner. The people facing away turned round either just in time to see it come to a halt, or missed it. I immediately assumed it was a surface tension effect, but when I checked it for water on the work surface everything was dry. The surface was level. I couldn’t find any sources of freak drafts, and the glass had been standing near the wall at the end of the work surface. I couldn’t find strings or threads, or any evidence of simple trickery. There had been nobody within 10 feet of the glass, and nobody else in the house: everyone was sitting at the same table as me. I put the glass back where it had been, and tried moving it in a similar manner several times, but each time it fell over due to the texture of the surface.
You could not reproduce the event yourself, which makes what allegedly happened a non-repeatable event. Unfortunately, science does not - and cannot - deal with them.
If the glass was upside down air would have been trapped inside. Is it possible that there were any temperature changes going on. Was the glass/worksurface warm or cold for instance, was there sunlight shining in? etc.
Don’t want to go too deep into it, but I once watched a teacup do the same thing. As it happened there was a slight incline on the counter, the bottom of the cup had a lip and some moisture on it, and when hot tea was poured into it it appears (to me) to have acted just like a frictionless puck. After a couple of tries, I repeated the phenomenon.
The incident you describe is very different, but I wouldn’t discount a physical explanation. Did it make any noise? If it didn’t, that might be indicative of an air-cushion effect. It didn’t happen to be sitting on the counter above a dishwasher on the dry cycle, did it?
After our undergraduate work, a very good friend of mine seriously considered going into parapsychology. He decided not to, because he claimed that the programs he looked into were not very rigorous at all.
Lately weve been finding that nature occasionally utilizes phenomena we were scarcely aware of only a century ago. We’ve managed to explain how bumblebees fly after sixty years of off-the-wall assertions that they shouldn’t be able to fly at all because until recently we didn’t have a decent understanding of vortexes. Similarly, nobody would have been able to explain how a gecko walks up walls prior to the adoption of modern atomic theory.
It stands to reason that the “paranormal” phenomena that isn’t fabrication or wishful thinking can be explained, somehow. But it’s going to be scientists who explain it, not ghost-chasers.
I agree, Urban Ranger. Which is why my question asks if there are any credible theories that start with the theorizing and work downwards (a la Einstein, Hawking, et al)?
G. Cornelius, it was nighttime and the temperature was constant and cool. The house didn’t have a dishwasher or anything mechanical and/or electrical that was on. There is a slight chance that high internal air pressure might provide the explanation, but it would have had to be a very efficient pneumatic effect to get it to travel so far. It also made a swooshing noise against the work surface. But maybe. In fact, “maybe” to all explanations. This is why I was very careful with my definitions.
Sofa, I agree with you too. The problem really is that, despite tons of anecdotes, nobody really even knows if this shit even really happens. So far everyone in this thread has been aiming for “explicable, but misinterpeted” regarding my experience. I really did look at lots of different explanations myself, none of which seemed totally satisfactory. Which is why I think it was either trickery by someone in the room, but seriously brilliant trickery with no admission, desire for credit, or hilarity from the perp - or it was simply inexplicable.
After having seen it myself, with witnesses, I’m prepared to allow “currently inexpicable”. Though in reality, I just don’t know. You really had to be there. It was damned peculiar.
The PEAR psychokinesis lab at Princeton University publishes theory papers about the long-distance PK affecting random number generators. The couple of papers I’ve seen look impenetrable, so I can’t tell you what their explanations may be. See the listed abstracts at Journal of Scientific Exploration:
And publications list at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publist.html
Strange reports infest all branches of science, but unfortunately most of them either aren’t reproducable, or they contradict current theory (and therefore are assumed to be mistakes.) For a large mass of of unexplained observations collected from decades of science journals, see Corliss’ encyclopedia sets called Sourcebook Project:
Also check out Mr. Corliss’ newsletter back issues. Interesting reading. Corliss mostly ignores reports coming from the public, and instead collects anecdotes from researchers and interesting bits from journals.
Even theoretical scientific ideas must arrive at some sort of testable hypothesis, or else they don’t last very long. I believe that SR was developed in conjunction with the Lorentz contraction, which was a well-established result of a repeatable (and repeated) experiment. And within a few years of publishing GR, repeatable experiments were proposed and carried out on its predicitons. This intimate relation with repeatable experimentation is more of a necessity for scientific theory than I think you realize.
Memory is not reliable. I am talking Police taking descriptions several hours after something happens does not fit with what they have on video tape. You are basically saying, and answering questions about an event that happened YEARS ago, so unless you have some sort of recorded data, your “experience” isn’t very reliable. Confabulation occurs, and your personal bias (which doesn’t seem very skeptical at all) slips in. You insert, unknowningly, data, “remember” events that didn’t quite happen the way they actually did, and so on. I have heard this is because the brain only stores chunks of data in memory, and when the memory is recalled, pieces that are missing are filled in.
I have several wierd events that happened to me as well, however, when I get together with my friends and discuss them, our experience differs, and we all saw the same thing and agreed on what we saw at the time.
Yes. In fact, most modern scientific theories, particularly those in the field of theoretical physics, work that way.
As pointed out somewhere else, these theories (or hypotheses) must be able to be verified and falstified through experiments and observations.
It is unfortunate that you don’t have any physical recordings of the event, for your memories of the fine details are most likely to be fuzzy at this point.
Understood. (Actually, I think you were posting that reply while I was composing my list of questions). But in order to try to answer your question about credible theories, we need information about the event you’re describing, or am I still missing the point?
Have you ever found evidence of rats or mice in the house?
I concede to everyone’s criticisms (even the anal one re “re”). I agree that my memory may be faulty. Though when I have mentioned this to other people who were there, they have agreed with my recall.
The reason for including the event is just to illustrate that even upstanding and skeptical members of the community such as myself can experience very odd things. Of course, that would presuppose that anyone has a clue who I am, let alone thinks I’m an upstanding and skeptical member of the community, so I might have got off on the wrong foot.
I also think it would have had to have been a mighty strong rat, and an invisible one… Giant invisible rats, a new paranormal phenomenon!
Well, the rat/mouse needn’t have been invisible; here’s a (somewhat far fetched) possible scenario:
Tumbler resting rim dowm on smooth surface.
Mouse climbs on top of tumbler, body heat causes air inside tumbler to expand very slightly, but this is counteracted for the moment by the weight of the mouse.
Mouse gets scared for some reason (maybe it saw a ghost ) and leaps from tumbler to safety this motion registers in jjimm’s peripheral vision and he turns to look.
Tumbler now relieved of weight of mouse, floats ever so slightly on a cushion of air and travels across surface due to motion imparted by jumping mouse (Newton’s third - mouse goes one way, tumbler goes the other).
Tumbler continues to move (perhaps aided by some imperceptible gradient) until the air cushion leaks away.
) and leaps from tumbler to safety this motion registers in jjimm’s peripheral vision and he turns to look.