Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [131]
This wonder had already been written and theorized about. It seems that in one experiment Dr. Schmidt set his random generator to work recording a number of "flips" on tape. No person observed the pattern, and no one produced a "readout" (printed record) of the session. The next day, the subject was given the task of influencing the generator, not knowing that the machine was not operating in the usual manner at that moment but running the tape of the night before instead. Bear in mind that the usual job of the subject was to try to psychically influence the machine as it generated the signals; here, the subject was presumed to be able to go back in time and influence the generator as it existed the night before when it turned out its tape! Since the Paradox of the chess pieces maintains that the absent king figure is neither black nor white until an observer enters the situation, it follows that the machine's signal is neither "heads" nor "tails" until the will of the subject makes it one or the other! Only when the subject is present and concentrating on the generator will the "consciousness" so beloved of Walker exert its influence, you see.
This is rough going for anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of this kind of thinking. I'm not at all accustomed to it, and I'm naive enough to think that a chess piece in a box is really a certain color whether I look or not. Because of this stubborn rationality I am cursed with, a typical ignorant question occurred to me. I asked Dr. Schmidt to suppose that a paper readout of the tape had been prepared immediately after it had been produced by the generator, unseen by human eyes. I asked him to further suppose that it had been mailed off to some inaccessible and primitive part of the world like Middletown, New Jersey, before the test commenced. When the experiment was ended, would the readout match the tape, or would only the tape agree with the observed experiment? His answer was obscure, and I did not follow it. I had hoped to ask for results if it were supposed that 250 copies of the tape (unobserved, of course) had been prepared; would all 251 tapes have been changed miraculously to agree with the observed results? If so, what a prodigious amount of work for the performer—going back in time without being aware of it, and changing all those tapes. Imagine taking a photograph of the readout (without looking!) and checking to see if the undeveloped latent image on the emulsion is also changed. The mind reels in astonishment when one considers the possibilities.
Why had Dr. Schmidt not mentioned these wonders in his lecture? He replied that the matter about which I expressed curiosity was far too complicated to go into in the short time he had. That was probably quite true. But I note that John Wheeler had—only a few days before—delivered his blast at the paraphysicists who had attempted to apply quantum mechanics to their madness, and Schmidt perhaps thought it prudent to avoid getting that dragon stirred up again at that moment.
As a result of the Schmidt lecture, the American Physical Society began making noises about conducting definitive tests of the Schmidt claims, beginning with sending Dr. Ray Hyman to San Antonio to observe a series of tests. But here we have a problem. If the observer interferes with the observed phenomenon, would not any failure be attributed to Hyman? And would not any success be similarly credited? Chance results—anathema to parapsychological experiments—might also put in an appearance. What to do? *
At lunch the next day, following a spirited press conference, I asked Dr. Schmidt just what he would do if his claims were proved to be faulty and his results erroneous. He paused for a moment, then looked me straight in the eye. He would not welcome such a turn of events, he said, but he certainly would accept it. I was gratified to hear this, suspecting as I do that this man has slipped into the same rut in which all parapsychologists seem to find themselves: They read into negative or minimal results much more significance than is warranted.