I didn’t want to introduce a(nother) highjack into the Uri Geller thread, but I did have this question: how do conservation laws figure in? I know about Einstein and his objections on the basis of the inverse square law: psychic information could never travel over immense distances, as are often attested anecdotally. (People who claim to have known, instantly, that loved ones were in trouble…thousands of miles away.) I get that part…
But conservation laws? How would the transmission of psychic knowledge violate those? I know there is absolutely no evidence for it, but, completely hypothetically, why couldn’t there be some yet-unknown communication medium allowing information to be passed between human brains. Yes, yes, I know it’s nothing but woo, but how is it woo that is forbidden by conservation laws?
(I once had a philosophy professor who defined telepathy as impossible, because, if I read your thoughts, they are now my thoughts, and no longer your thoughts, so, by definition, I can never read your thoughts. I noted that the same argument would deny the possibility of any other form of communication! I can’t talk to you and share my thoughts either, per his definition!)
People who claim some kind of supernatural or “psychic” powers make all sorts of different kinds of claims. Some claim clairvoyance (spooky knowledge at a distance). Some claim telekinesis (moving things by mind-power, Jedi style; bending spoons). Some claim pre-cognition (knowing things before they happen). Some claim to know where Judge Crater went.
One could imagine that our brains do emit some sort of radio waves (not physically unimaginable; hey, radios do it), and some might claim enough sensitivity to pick up others’ transmissions. But the data wouldn’t move faster than light. Those who claim to know far-away events instantly are just plain wrong. If they are truly clairvoyant, they would know far-away event a very short time afterward. Hey, how long does it take a radio wave to go from, say, Tokyo to New York? Some fraction of a second? I can easily see why such clairvoyants could claim to know instantly when in fact they’re actually a fraction of a second late to get the news.
Other kinds of claimed psychic powers might indeed violate the roolz as we know them. Telekinesis may be a case in point. See this article, in which Cecil discusses the possibility of a psychic carrying some heavy gold coins across a bridge. The psychic (described as a magician there) weighs 68 kg; three gold coins weighing 1 kg each; bridge can only carry 70 kg. How can he cross the bridge?
[spoiler]
The “magician” is really no magician at all; he is simply a juggler. So he juggles the coins as he crosses, keeping one in the air at all times. Of course, the problem statement can’t simply say he’s a juggler, as this would give the answer away. But calling him a “magician” is certainly misleading.
It’s argued that juggling the coins across the bridge can’t work. Even if he’s a true magician and levitates one of the coins, so that it floats over his head all the way, the force he’s using to do so must exert an equal downward force on the magician and the bridge.
Of course, if we accept the hypothetical that he’s truly a magician, capable to true magic, then by definition that means he can violate the roolz as we know them, so all bets are off. But then, the original problem is no problem at all, is it?
[/spoiler]So you have a case there where an alleged psychic power, if for real, really would violate the roolz.
I’m sure some 'doper will be along to prove I’m wrong, but (with the caveat that it’s all a bunch of horseshit):
AFAIK, there isn’t any violation of law here. Off the top of my head, quantum entanglement would be one way you could transmit information over even interstellar distances…afaik, there is no distance limitation in fact…so, in theory if somehow this effect could just happen between two people it’s at least theoretically possible.
Didn’t read the other thread, but just answering what you asked, to the best of my own (admittedly limited) understanding there is no law that would be violated. I don’t see any mechanism by which you COULD do this, and certainly zero evidence that it happens, but I think you already acknowledged all of that.
The psion particle carries information instantaneously over distances and bends spoons without violating conservation laws. It’s all in the math, which is difficult to provide here because it’s all done in base wisserteen.
Reading thoughts presumably would be at the speed of light or less otherwise it would violate causality. It would be no different than listening to radio waves, presumably.
Robert Heinlein’s juvenile SF “Time for the Stars” took advantage of the concept of instantaneous telepathy as a means to allow communication with (slightly) slower-than-light starships. Of course, the basic problem is that “simultaneous” means something different in every frame of reference when time as well as distance and mass vary with relative speed.
As for telekinesis - that would be hand-waving. You could say that the energy is used by the pyschic (i.e. burn sugar or body fat) to convert it to woo-waves that lift the objects. This construct would also put limits on what the person can lift, thus making any story more believable.
The problem with a “magical” power is of course, how do you put a limit on it? (Rodenbury mentioned that the biggest problem with writing Star Trek shows was answering the question why don’t they just teleport out of trouble? Note how many times the teleporter was down, the ion storm was interfering, the advanced alien woo blocked it, or the ship had to amscray and leave them…)
As opposed to the unlimited power in Jumper, Larry Niven in his stories dreamed up electronic teleportation and then devised a method for the passenger to shed the difference of earth’s rotational velocity as they teleported to another location far away. In the novel The Witling the same effect is mentioned for psychic teleportation by Vernor Vinge. Ah, science.
but really, what work is done? In teleportation, unless the mass rises or falls in the gravity field, or changes velocity, no work is done. However, earth’s rotation and the difference has to be accounted for if you exceed, say, a few miles.
For levitation, there’s to work to avoid falling; plus, the work to translate horizontally - i.e.start and stop.
For telepathy, there’s a small amount of work to convert “radio” or other psychic emanations to neuron work in the mind.
then there’s “knowing”, or “tele-vision”. If I can see what’s on the piece of paper in the folded envelope, how does that work? Here’s where it’s fun to be a SF or fantasy author - you get to make up the rules. Can I see long distance? Can I just read the mind of whoever saw or wrote it? Can I see in the dark, can I sense the “aura” of things? Only live things? Can I “see” electrical fields or heat (I.e. life and mechano-electric devices?) you as author make up the rules and analyze them for consistency. There’s the story about how the Invisible Man would be blind, since photons would go through his retina without being captured…and of course, no lens to focus the light, no eyeball to block ambient light if it did impinge on his rtina… Larry Niven has a really good piece about picking apart fantasy - for example, if Superman made love to a normal woman, would he blow her head off when he ejaculated? Would he super-sperm fly out creating multiple microscopic puncture wound in her torso, to fly around the neighbourhood and impregnate any likely candidate within a mile or two? Why wasn’t every woman in Smallville always pregnant once Superboy hit puberty?
Minority Report, for example, was a good story about how to lie to psychics… Although several others by Niven, Bester, and Anderson come to mind.
Quantum entanglement does not transmit information. Arguably, it makes it look like particles can transmit information in order to have the statistical properties they do, but no actual information is transmitted.
Again, correct me if I’m wrong here, as it’s been decades since I even vaguely studied this stuff, but it’s no USABLE information is transmitted (as far as we know)…not no information. If have two electrons that are quantum entangled, and I wiggle one on one side of the universe, then the other wiggles as well on the other side of the universe…correct? No method known is going to allow you to transmit usable data (i.e. some sort of message), but the particles still have what Einstein called that (to paraphrase as I’m too lazy to look it up) ‘spooky action at a distance’ stuff going on.
So, assuming I have all that right, there should be no conservation laws violated by the supposed ability of one person knowing when another dies by some sort of woo magic psychic stuff. There might be all sorts of other aspects of physics that make it impossible, but not conservation of whatever type laws, least not afaict anyway.
Nope. This is what people really, really want quantum entanglement to be, because it would be so convenient if it was really like that. But entanglement doesn’t survive anyone touching either particle. If you have two entangled electrons and wiggle one, you end up with two non-entangled electrons.
At any rate it’s somewhat moot in regards to psychic powers. If psychic powers worked, there’s no particular reason to believe they wouldn’t work through classical means. It’s just the raging hard-on woo-advocates have for the word “quantum” that makes them imagine otherwise.
Definitely agree that we can throw out “instantaneous” transfer of information, but, then, as you note, it doesn’t matter a hang, as, for any earthly purpose, the speed of light is plenty!
re the telekinesis trick, it might be (stretching the imagination farther than it was meant to go) that the “link of force” stretches from the ground up to the hovering coins, instead of from the psychic up to the hovering coins (or from the bridge up to the hovering coins…) But, shrug: that’s just making up excuses.
I do agree, however, that telekinesis does violate the rules of physics, most specifically Newtonian laws of force. Unless the psychic’s brain somehow is blowing little jets of air (or other matter) at the pendulum, I can’t see any way the guy’s mind can cause the pendulum to swing. “Reactionless force” of this kind violates the known rules of action/reaction.
(Is that a “conservation” law, per se?)
That’s what I was thinking: I’m not coming up with any conservation law that forbids the transfer of information from one mind to another. In extremis, one can fancy some plausible physical explanation, like pheremone chemistry, or ultra-low-frequency sound waves (elephants do it, so why not us?) But, again, it’s well to repeat, zero evidence, pure fanciful speculation.
Now, yeah, FTL communication does violate some important laws. (But, doggone, that was a right fine SF novel!)
As noted above, I can’t figure out how these waves would impart momentum to an object. There doesn’t seem to be any “exchange particle.” (If somebody shoots somebody else with a gun, the bullet carries the momentum. In TK, what does that job?)
Of course, this is more of a dramatic problem than a physical one. But, speaking as a not-too-successful fantasy writer, I totally agree. It’s VERY difficult to create a magic system for a novel that doesn’t get out-of-hand. It’s possible, of course, but mighty difficult.
John W. Campbell famously believed that a SF mystery story would be impossible, because the protagonist would simply invent a hyper-advanced hoo-ha machine that solved the mystery. Isaac Asimov proved him wrong. (And Randall Garrett did the same for fantasy mysteries.)
I got to see Vernor Vinge as a local SF convention just last weekend. In addition to a really fine SF writer, he is also one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. And, yes, he does put in the extra work to make his SF “valid.” When he breaks the rules of physics, at least he knows how to cover it up with plausible explanations. (And, yes, Niven also.)
And…of course…write oneself into all sorts of terrible corners! The sidestream consequences of one’s major assumptions can sneak up on you!
Yes! “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.” Brilliant, and hilarious!
This is true, but note that it depends on another property of quantum mechanics, which one at least might suppose to have come out otherwise: the fact that unknown quantum states cannot be cloned. Because if you could clone, then you could simply have Alice measure her qubit if she wants to send a bit of a certain value, say 0, and do nothing if she wants to send a 1. Then, Bob prepares many copies of the state, and measures them in the same basis as Alice. If he receives random outcomes, he knows Alice has not performed a measurement, and if his measurements agree, he knows that she did; and thus, knows whether a 0 or 1 was sent. It was in fact in this setting that the no-cloning theorem was first discovered.
Why couldn’t telekinesis be like magnetism? For the average observer, a magnetic field is just as woo as psychic powers - there’s nothing but this magical “field” from one object (or both) connecting the two.
how it works at right angles to the sender and the target is just woo - the amazing thing is that unconnected devices are affected.
By Newton’s laws (forget quantum) there’s an equal and opposite… so presumably levitating anything too large would be like standing on a teeter-totter, you’d just pop up into the air yourself, or if the pivot is your feet - fall flat on your face. I’ll go with the off-center pivot, this shows you can levitate yourself by exerting “the Force” on an immovable object… But you’re not going to lift a multi-ton X-Wing out of the swamp of Dagobah…
And after floating in the air for a few minutes you should be dripping with sweat…
Belief in psychic powers is often bound up with a belief in Cartesian dualism (or something similar): the idea that the mind is some sort of immaterial, non-physical, “spiritual” thing, separate from, but interacting with, the brain. Quite a lot of both believers in psychic phenomena, and skeptics about them, implicitly or explicitly believe in this connection. For instance, Charles Tart, who is one of the leading “scientific” theorists of, and experimenters on, psychic phenomena, explicitly argues that evidence for such phenomena (and he thinks the evidence is strong) constitutes evidence for dualism.
[I once, somewhat reluctantly, spent a semester as Professor Tart’s teaching assistant. It was an uncomfortable experience for me as I found myself complicit in teaching something I did not believe was true, and there seemed to me to be a good degree of intellectual dishonesty in Tart’s curriculum, which presented a one-sidedly positive picture of the strength of the evidence for psi, and was too dismissive of critics. However, although I did not wind up persuaded that psychic phenomena are real, I did gain an appreciation of the strength of the theoretical and empirical case for them, which is certainly considerably stronger than most casual skeptics seem to realize.]
Anyway, the point is that it has quite frequently been argued that Cartesian dualism is incompatible with the law of conservation of energy. Dualism holds that thoughts, decisions etc. that occur in the immaterial mind affect our behavior by affecting processes in the brain. Ultimately that boils down to the mind moving something in the brain in some way, and that amounts to putting energy into the system from “outside” the physical world (the non-physical mind), which violates the conservation law. Thus, if psychic phenomena depend on dualism being true, and dualism violates energy conservation, psychic phenomena are inconsistent with the scientific laws of energy conservation. I suspect this argument is what razncain (quoted in the OP) and Einstein had in mind.
However, both the links in the argument are rather weak. For one thing, it has been argued (most notably by the pioneering neuroscientist Sir John Eccles) that quantum mechanics allows for the possibility that an immaterial mind might influence the brain without violating the conservation law. Eccles argues that key components in the brain, such as synapses, are small enough for quantum uncertainties to affect their function, and that an immaterial mind might be able to bias their behavior at this level without violating energy conservation. Although these effects (if they exist) would be tiny, he argues that the brain is appropriately structured to amplify them to the level where they will affect behavior.
Please note, I am not endorsing the above argument. I am just pointing out that versions of it have been put forward by people who are not ignorant, either about the brain or about QM. I should also add that, even if Eccles and his ilk are right that the energy conservation argument against Cartesian dualism can be circumvented, many (including me) think that there are other very good reasons to reject dualism.
On the other hand, at least some believers in psychic phenomena believe that they (or, at least, some of them) can be explained in physical terms, and do not imply Cartesian Dualism. For instance, the physicist (and, latterly, neuroscientist) John Taylor once argued that Uri Geller’s abilities could be explained by low frequency radio waves generated by electrical activity in the nervous system. (The nervous system does emit some electromagnetic radiation, but it is very weak, and almost certainly does not produce any psychic-like phenomena, or, indeed, do much of anything.) Taylor later recanted these ideas, and came to believe that Geller is a fraud, and that psychic phenomena are not real. However, I am fairly sure that there are others who still do believe that some “psychic” phenomena are real, but can, in principle, be explained in physical terms. (People who hold this sort of view probably do not accept the reality of all types of psychic phenomena. It is hard to imagine how some alleged psychic phenomena - ghosts, perhaps, or precognition - could ever be reconciled with physics. On the other hand it is not difficult to imagine, at least in vague outline, how something like telepathy and perhaps even some types of telekinesis might be physically possible, perhaps by something like the mechanisms that Taylor suggested. That does not mean that they actually are possible, still less that they actually happen, but I think it is fair to say that it is not obvious that all alleged psychic phenomena are necessarily incompatible with known physical laws.)
Thanks for taking an interest. Sorry, I missed this earlier, I’ve been interested in that other thread when I have had the time, and when it got switched to another area, I just stumbled upon this, and will catch up on some of this thread as my time permits if I can actually contribute anything, but think others will be more qualified to do so than me.
IANAP, but the laws of denial would still apply to any new unknown forces, interactions and energies that might possibly be discovered. That’s how the late Milton Rothman explained it to me in his book, A Physicists Guide To Skepticism. He’s probably wrote one of the very few books (Prometheus Books) that covers this particular aspect of applying this sort of stuff to psychic phenomena, and other pseudoscientific claims from parapsychologists who seem to ignore all of physics. He goes into more detail about the conservation laws as well as other aspects of physics that you can read a large portion of it at Amazon on-line for free with that link I gave you. I haven’t refreshed my memory on it much since I read mine back in ’86, so I’m a bit rusty, and not sure how much I could contribute here, but may pick up on a few things if time permits. I’m in need of another re-read of it, but still doubt I could keep up with you guys. Let me know what you think if you do find the time to read it though. I think you’d enjoy it.
On a tangent, there’s also the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Telepathy would seem to decrease entropy, so to avoid breaking the law it would have to have to involve enough effort on the part of the participants to offset the decrease in entropy. But, since a little info is a very small change in entropy, it doesn’t take much sweating to overcome. To do the math, we’d have to measure the information in bits, which might be difficult to do (a little sarcasm intended).
Considerations like that, though, would apply just as much to, say, talking to someone. It does not raise any special problems for telepathy than it does for all sorts of ordinary, perfectly real activities we do all the time.
But that isn’t the question I asked. I was told that psychical stuff violates a specific given law, and I asked for clarification. I certainly understand that there is zero evidence for psychical woo, but, again, that isn’t what I asked.
Ah! I hadn’t thought of that. So, okay… But I still get to ask, what about (proposed) telepathy that obeys the inverse-square law. e.g., I can read thoughts from a subject sitting right beside me, if not one in Columbus Ohio.
The main problem is that magnetism shows up on sensing devices, like ordinary pocket compasses. But, sure, something like magnetism, just not yet discovered. As above, we’d stipulate that it does obey the inverse-square law, and, as you note, it also requires the balancing of the books with respect to energy.
Glad to have you here on this: I thought of giving you a heads-up PM, but figured (and hoped!) you’d eventually see it.
I will get it and read it, but, alas, probably not before this thread sinks below the visibility horizon. I’ll try to send you a PM, anyway.
As you can see, what I’m trying to do is focus in on reasons that psychical stuff might – in the most abstract hypothetical way! – be possible. We’ve zeroed in on several specific rules that would limit TP and TK and so on, but we haven’t quite yet gotten to the point where they aren’t possible at all.
njtt beat me to it: yes, entropy is a concern, but, then, as Learjeff notes, the overall magnitude of the objection is very, very small. Yes, my computer has to have a power supply, because it requires an input of energy to perform such operations as sorting a list of data. But we, in our own minds, can sort lists of data – and, as you note, it doesn’t leave us sweating. So, yes, valid point, but, fortunately, one that doesn’t rule out telepathy.