Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (24 page)

Given (a) the ambiguities of the experiments and (b) the absence of a physical mechanism to explain the reported results, many scientists discount the whole paranormal topic.

The requirements for science fiction are less rigorous. As long as the paranormal hasn't been
dis
proven, there is ample latitude for storytelling....

There's a lot of the paranormal in science fiction, literary and dramatic,
¹²
and I'll limit myself to a few examples organized by paranormal ability. Almost always that ability manifests without any more explanation than that a character has a gift or a mutation, takes a drug, or survived traumatic events that awakened an ability latent in everyone. At the physical level, any of those is no explanation at all.

As illustrations, I lean toward classics of the field.

Telepathy, mind reading, and empathy:

• Alfred Bester's 1953 novel
The Demolished Man
(incidentally, the first Hugo Award winner) explored the effects on society of telepathy.

• Robert Heinlein, in
Time for the Stars
(1956), used telepathy between separated twins for instantaneous communications between starship and distant Earth.

• The
Star Trek
TV/movie franchise has the often plot-convenient Vulcan mind melds.

• David Brin's Uplift Universe series offers the Tymbrimi species, members of which cast and receive emotional "glyphs" through cranial tendrils.

• Richard Phillips's 2012 Rho Agenda series, whose heroes, their minds tweaked by alien technology, learn to communicate telepathically.

Teleportation:

• Again from Alfred Bester, from 1956, we have
The Stars My Destination
(in the UK,
Tiger! Tiger!)
extending teleportation ("jaunting") to interplanetary distances.

• From Steven Gould, in 1992, we have
Jumper
(later a movie by the same name) and its sequels,
Reflex
and
Impulse.

Psychokinesis (aka telekinesis):

• From 1952, in the pages of
Astounding,
Jack Vance's novella "Telek."

• The 1981 movie
Scanners
—see heads explode!

• Stephen King's 1974 debut novel (and later the movie)
Carrie
—see lots of stuff explode and burn and...

Miscellaneous psychic powers:

• Precognition, as in Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" (later adapted as a movie).

• Mind control, as practiced by Jedi and Sith alike in the
Star Wars
universe.

• Psychic navigation, as performed by spice-altered navigators of Frank Herbert's Dune series (several of which were first serialized in
Analog).

• Psychic wish fulfillment, as in Jerome Bixby's eerie 1953 story "It's a Good Life."

• Multitalented paranormal supermen: A. E. Van Vogt's
Slan
(first serialized in
Astounding,
September through December 1940).

• And given the degree of skepticism as to whether paranormal phenomena even exist, let us not forget hoaxers such as the private investigators on the popular TV series
Psych.

That's but a small sampling, with these (and other) psychic powers popping up in science fiction of every length, in all media.

In 1937, a few months before John W. Campbell took over the editorial reins at
Astounding,
his story "Forgetfulness" appeared in the magazine.
¹³
In that story, alien starfarers visit a far-future Earth whose few human residents appear to be in terminal decline. The latter have abandoned ancient cities of mile-high towers to live in twenty-foot domes. Communicating telepathically with their visitors, humans appear at a loss to explain anything about technologies once wielded by their mighty ancestors. It's sad, the aliens think, as they prepare to colonize—only to experience time and space bent by the thoughts of a super-evolved human for whom spaceships are almost as quaint as flint arrowheads.

SF encyclopedist Brian Stableford speculates that Campbell was predisposed toward paranormal possibilities by reason of having attended Duke University while J. B. Rhine was performing his famous series of experiments there. Whether or not that's the case, the paranormal (which Campbell preferred to call "psionics") fascinated the man. In a 1959 editorial "We Must Study Psi"
¹⁴
Campbell wrote:

Dr. Rhine originally started his investigation of psi because, as a professional psychologist, he had come to the conclusion that psychology-as-such lacked an essential element. You would have an exceedingly hard time working out biochemistry, if your chemistry hadn't discovered nitrogen, for example. Rhine's studies led him to suspect something about as important as nitrogen to biochemistry was missing from psychology.

And:

Ours is the only culture that officially denies magic. And... ours does not, by several millennia, qualify as a "very long" culture. The denial of magic is only about three centuries old. You can fool a large percentage of a people for that short a period of time.

The psi machines I've encountered work—and they work on precisely the same ancient laws of magic that those wide-scattered peoples have, independently, accepted.

In the same editorial, Campbell discusses dowsing, the Hieronymus machine,
¹⁵
and the application of psi to
photos
of crops to protect physical crops from insects.

A bit more about Campbell: He studied physics at MIT and completed his B.S. at Duke University. Isaac Asimov called Campbell, "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely."
¹⁶

As editor, Campbell treated psi as a core element of "hard"—that is, scientifically based— science fiction. Convinced or not, many
Astounding
authors of the Campbell era incorporated the paranormal into their stories (some of which we've already seen).

I mostly write the hard stuff: science fiction that won't cause scientists and engineers to hurl my books across the room in dismay. (Such, anyway, is my goal.) Could I, were I to so choose, write hard SF involving the paranormal?

As it happens, yes.

Rhine and Targ did not attempt to explain the paranormal, only to demonstrate the effect and to make observations. Targ asserts that remote viewing is both unaffected by electromagnetic shielding and insensitive to range over terrestrial distances.
¹⁷

Having already looked at the controversy surrounding efforts to exhibit the paranormal, let's ask a different question. Does modern physics suggest ways in which minds
could
have such paranormal abilities?

For at least some of the claimed abilities, yes.

Consider extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation, with frequencies of just a few Hertz (aka, cycles per second). Any wave's frequency and wavelength (the distance that separates two adjacent crests) vary reciprocally; ELF radiation—with wavelengths in the thousands of miles!—passes unimpeded through the thin metal sheets and screens that comprise conventional shielding.

To an ELF wave, the Earth's surface and the ionosphere are two sides of a naturally occurring waveguide. Whereas freely propagating electromagnetic radiation (say, the light emitted by a bulb) spreads in all directions and rapidly attenuates with distance according to an inverse square law, EM waves confined to a waveguide (say, light traveling through a fiberoptic cable) propagate in one direction, along the waveguide—and do not attenuate.

No attenuation and immunity from conventional shielding; that sounds like a candidate mechanism for the paranormal. Right? No, and it's again related to ELF radiation's long wavelengths. Not only does no known structure in the human brain generate or receive ELF waves, it's hard to see how the brain, or even the entire human body, could interact with waves thousands of miles long.

A more promising option can be found in quantum mechanics: the branch of physics that describes phenomena at atomic (and smaller) scales. To appreciate how quantum mechanics might apply, we must first take a detour through classical (pre-QM) physics.

Our intuition and experience tells us that separated objects do not interact. Isaac Newton, despite the tremendous predictive power of his formula in characterizing gravitational attraction—after more than three centuries, it's accurate enough to plan most NASA space missions—struggled with the counterintuitive implication of his equation: that somehow gravity acts at a distance.
¹⁸
Indeed, Newton called the notion, "so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

Newton was correct to have doubts. Albert Einstein's more complete theory of gravity, formally known as General Relativity, shows— simplifying furiously—that the gravitational attraction seemingly exerted between objects across great distances actually results from (a) mass warping space-time and (b) one object interacting with the
local
curvature of space-time caused by that other object. Or, as physicist John Wheeler so elegantly (if anthropomorphically) captured the essence of General Relativity in twelve words: "Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move."

Among the eerier attributes of quantum mechanics is
non
locality: interaction between distant objects without any intermediary... anything. Two particles (such as electrons) that once interacted and then separate can maintain a relationship known as quantum entanglement. For as long as the particles remain entangled, a change in one (say, the orientation of the first electron's spin) causes a complementary change to the second (makes it spin in the opposite orientation). The entanglement mechanism operates independently of distance—and instantaneously.
¹⁹
Through entanglement, the paired particles become, in some sense, a single entity.

Einstein called this entangled behavior "spooky action at a distance" and considered it evidence of a crack in the foundations of the then-young theory of quantum mechanics. This time, Einstein was mistaken. Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated again and again. In the case of paired photons, entanglement has been demonstrated over distances approaching one hundred miles (for particles with mass, the distances are better described in yards). But it should be noted that entanglement between particles is a fragile affair. The slightest jostling of either entangled particle can destroy the relationship.

Spooky action at a distance? Freedom from attenuation with distance? A connection that is independent of electromagnetism (and so, the link would be unaffected by EM shielding)? That sure sounds like a candidate mechanism for the paranormal.

Much as Newton felt uneasy about the implications of his model for gravity, scientists continue to argue about the physical significance of the mathematical description that is modern quantum-mechanical theory.
²⁰

Very briefly, QM is inherently probabilistic. Its math never says, as one example, where an electron
is.
Instead, QM enables us to calculate how apt we are to find that electron here, or there, or anywhere else. A time-varying mathematical entity called the "wave function" captures the probability of where the electron might be found.

Of course, when we do measure an electron's position, it's not here and there and somewhere else—it's in a particular spot.

The plurality of physicists surveyed say of this dilemma: don't ask. Others speak to the act of measurement as "collapsing the wave function" to the unique location where the electron is observed. Then there is the QM interpretation of immediate relevance. Such prominent physicists as Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann have (at times) asserted the need for a
conscious observer
to determine the outcome of observations. In this interpretation, the physical universe requires consciousness to operate.

Combine the nonlocality of quantum entanglement with an intrinsic connection between matter (such as a brain) and consciousness and—voilà—we have a candidate mechanism for the paranormal. Emphasis on
candidate.
As fascinating as the media find polls, science doesn't operate by ballot. It may nonetheless be worth noting that the conscious-observer approach is far from a leading interpretation of QM. Perhaps because of the chicken-and-egg riddle it would pose regarding brain-made-of-matter and conscious mind. Perhaps because of the riddle it would pose as to the feasibility of matter existing before brains to observe quantum interactions. Perhaps because we don't know what consciousness is....

Although science has yet to reach any consensus on the underlying meaning of quantum mechanics
or
the nature of consciousness, mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff propose that consciousness arises from quantum-mechanical effects within submicron intraneuron structures called microtubules.
²¹

If
that
conjecture is valid, then, just maybe, ensembles of microtubules across the brain also cooperate to transmit and receive quantum-entangled particles at longer ranges (i.e., beyond one's own skull). And maybe other ensembles of microtubules in the brain can categorize, manipulate, and otherwise work with the associated data. (To remotely view a designated scene, for example, the subject must have a way to identify and focus upon specific relevant entanglements.) And perhaps eons of evolution developed ways to maintain entangled states over longer times and distances than does the latest human technology.

In short: piling conjecture upon speculation upon surmise we can glimpse a basis, drawing upon contemporary (although not prevailing) scientific thinking, for a mechanism that might underpin some paranormal phenomena.