USAF Studies Teleportation

ArchAngel21x writes "Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation. But scientists aren't so thrilled. The Air Force Research Lab's August 'Teleportation Physics Report', posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending."

Comments

For the love of.....

[BWJones]

Initially I thought this may have some relevance to encryption as there is a phenomenon of quantum teleportation that appears to have some scientific validity and would have significance in military and strategic planning and communication. However, when I actually started reading the article, at first I could not stop laughing until I reached this part:

From the linked .pdf :An experimental program similar in fashion to the Remote Viewing program should be funded at $900,000 - 1,000,000 per year in parallel with a theoretical program funded at $500,000 per year for an initial five-year duration.

What!!!!!???? I am thunderstruck that this recommendation could be made. 1.5 Million dollars for essentially a program that the CIA back in the 1970's decided was full of crap and decided to abandon. By the way, the CIA's program was ill conceived and full of it back then too amounting to a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.

Other conclusions in the document are: "We will need a physics theory of consciousness and psychotronics, along with more experimental data, in order to test the hypothesis in Section 5.1.1 and discover the physical mechanisms that lay behind the psychotronic manipulation of matter." What can I say? The status of basic science education among those who make funding decisions within certain areas of government are pitiful.

Even worse is this statement: "This phenomenon could generate a dramatic revolution in technology, which would result from a dramatic paradigm shift in science. Anomalies are the key to all paradigm shifts! " which has got to be the work of someone with a marketing background and absolutely no self respect in the scientific community. A document like this would be laughed out of the NIH or any other respectable scientific funding agency, but the scary thing is funding like this has always been able to go forward under the guise of military funding in crisis situations where fear abounds. Combine that with no understanding of science and this is what you get. If any of my students came up with something like this, I think I would cry.

Hey, if the Air Force wants out of the box thinkers, I can come up with all sorts of biomemetic and bioencryption stuff for 1.5 Million that would be based in scientific fact with reliable peer review science behind it.

Re:For the love of.....

[Raindance]

Understood and agreed. I've found that bringing discussion of "paradigm shifts" into research is usually just used as a distraction to shift attention away from bad research.

RD

Re:For the love of.....

[Anonymous Coward]

American lysenkoism, such as it is, is the result of giving money to the people who promise the most. It's a collective problem, without any one identifiable person driving the drivel.

I saw this in the telecom industry. Our company had a mania for the "make or buy" decision. That meant, in practice, that the money went to the group that made the biggest promises. Consequently, everyone promised more than they could actually accomplish. Managers knew that, of course, but they went along because they were subject to the same pressures. You could see, year after year, more hyperbole and overstatement creeping into goal statements, mission statements, and everything. It becomes an erosion of honesty, and (like in lysenkoism), one can imagine drifting off into a fantasy world.

In industry, of course, the free market will eventually stop such corporate fantasies. If only because people stop buying the resulting products and the company flounders.

Another example of such over-promising is the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology. Mind you, the ISN is a bunch of competent people doing real research, and I expect them to do great things. Still, they cannot resist making wild promises on their web site, http://web.mit.edu/isn/aboutisn/index.html.

"Imagine a bullet-proof jumpsuit, no thicker than ordinary spandex, that monitors health, eases injuries, communicates automatically, and maybe even lends superhuman abilities."

Uh huh. Lemme see. How much force needs to be applied to stop a bullet in the thickness of spandex? Quite a bit. If you do a minor calculation, you'll find it's completely ridiculous, yet these guys with physics Ph.D.s tolerate this kind of crap as advertisement.

They tolerate it because if they don't, someone else will say it, and that someone will get the money. The Army guys play along. That way, they can presumably point out to congressmen the wonderful things they will get from their research money.

Personally, I think that the root of the problem is that no one is really paid to evaluate these research proposals. It's expected to be done in one's spare time.

Re:For the love of.....

[Zondar]

It is only when you expand your beliefs of what is "possible" beyond the limits of your 'basic science education' that real discoveries are possible. Lots of people in history have been laughed out of town that turned out to make significant scientific discoveries.

I mean, *everone* knows the Earth is the center of the universe... /rolleyes (That darned Copernicus)

And as for those "invisible streams of particles" - *I* don't see any particles, and I don't feel them either! Everyone knows you're making it up!! (Radioactivity? Marie Curie, anyone?)

Tiny little dimensions curled up so small that even particle accelerators can't see them? Science fiction (oh yeah, that's called String Theory, isn't it?)

And...

And...

Remote Viewing sounds a lot like the work of Edgar Cayce - whose actions still mystify people today. Being able to go into a "trance" and deliver accurate medical diagnoses of people whom he had never touched, only had the address and a rough physical description... even to the point of breaking off the diagnosis session when the person died ACROSS THE ATLANTIC OCEAN...

Whether it's real or not, I'm not sure anyone really knows or can prove one way or another yet. However, there have always been theories on a 'collective unconscious' or something similar - something like a giant radio channel on which the thoughts and actions of everyone everywhere is available.

Don't laugh at the 'unbelievable' too hard. It might be next year's Science Today.

Re:For the love of.....

[killjoe]

I just want to pick a nit with you. You said.

' Incredible claims require incredibly strong evidence to back them up.'

This is a ridiculus statement to make. All claims should be judged by the same criterea. Just because you think the claim is ridiculus you should not be able to raise the bar for proof beyond any other claim. Science is science, proof is proof. You don't get to say "this proof is not sufficient because your claim is incredible".

Re:For the love of.....

[pilgrim23]

Folks. this is how it works: It is 90 days till the end of the budget cycle. You have $2-3 million left over, If you do NOT have a documented use for that money come Appropriation Day then your budget will be docked by this amount. Budget and the size of your department are all that matter in government land. It matters not one jot what this is spent on, it MUST be spent and it must be spent in a document able way. If the idea is hair brained, stupid, and a waste it may or may not be dredged out of the cesspool of bureaucracy and scrutinized on Slash dot or other forums (like the Congress), but in most cases it just makes another month's pay for a Beltway Bandit "Think Tank" or "Institute". Face it folks: Taxes are never levied for the benefit of those taxed, and the money gained is never spent in a worthwhile way.

Re:For the love of.....

[winwar]

Well, because we are nitpicking...

When exactly does science "prove" something?

How does science or the scientific method "prove" something?

It doesn't.

It gathers evidence to support hypotheses, which then may become theories, laws and paradigms. But it hasn't "proven" anything. It provides the most likely explanation, at best.

And I think it is reasonable to expect that incredible claims have incredibly strong evidence to back them up. Otherwise, they are unlikely to be accepted. If you claim teleportation is possible, you had better be able to do it, at least on a small scale, otherwise people will rightly think you are crackpot....

Re:For the love of.....

[Sammy76]

Right, and the roads I drive on, libraries I use, schools I attend, courts that uphold our laws and the military that defends us are all completely worthless and solely for the benefit of some politician and their corporate whores.

I'm sure if we eleminated taxes and spent our windfall on more shit from Wal-Mart the invisible hand of capitalism would take care of all our problems for us.

Re:For the love of.....

[Total_Wimp]

Whether it's real or not, I'm not sure anyone really knows or can prove one way or another yet. However, there have always been theories on a 'collective unconscious' or something similar - something like a giant radio channel on which the thoughts and actions of everyone everywhere is available.

A teenage friend of my daughter told me the other day about his desire to get free energy out of magnets. His theory was that since they're constantly pushing against each other, you can use that push to power a fan which would turn a wind turbine. He believed that the theory hadn't been adequately tested and he wanted to borrow some or the high-powered magnets I had gotten out of hard drives.

Naturaly I gave him the magnets (never squash initiative in a teenager if you can possibly help it), but they came with discussion of putting in as much energy as you get out, potential energy in a gravity well, etc.

He was a kid, the magnets were basically free. His "experiments" would cause no harm. I sat down and told him the truth before letting him proceed. If we're going to have this kind of relationship with full grown men, I'd prefer we did it with free magnets and an education program instead of 7.5 million bucks of our hard-earned tax dollars.

TW

Re:For the love of.....

[JudgeFurious]

You really don't have a clue about this do you? Sure the roads you drive on, libraries you use, schools you attend, and courts that uphold our laws as well as the military that defend us all get taken care of and they're each and every one a worthy reason to pay your taxes. But if you think the end of the year "Find something to do with this money quick!" effect doesn't happen then you're wrong.

It's the result of the culture of government. Work in it and you'll see it in person. I can only speak to local government and a little bit to state level but I think it would be shocking if the same things didn't happen on the Fed level.

From the start of the fiscal year management guards their funds like the money is coming out of their own checking account. At the start of our fiscal year you can't order a pack of friggin CDR's without three signatures. The department managers all turned in budgets that were approved and that included these expenses. They've been approved once before you even ask for them. But when the time comes to buy them it's an ordeal. They're like this over most anything you can imagine needing and big items like Servers involve piles of paper justifying their purchase. "It's the taxpayers money" is the phrase of the day. Then a funny thing happens near the end of the fiscal year. All these money hoarding managers start to figure out that they've still got money available that's "use or lose". See, all of them padded the shit out of their budgets when they turned them in for approval and they haven't used 3/4 of the total yet.

Suddenly you can get anything that you can think of for about a month. It's a spending frenzy and some of the stupidest shit you can think of gets bought. Some good gets done from time to time but usually it's spent on stuff we don't need to do things we're never going to do.

Re:For the love of.....

[FindFirstOne]

It's tempting to generalize when promoting fringe science. It's also tempting to generalize when debunking fringe science. Perhaps the most maligned of the fringe projects has been the SRI (not CIA) remote viewing study which has been referred to in this thread. People who take the time to read the reports of this study find two things: One, that the percentage of hits (remote views which conformed to the experiment's criteria for accuracy) was statistically significant; Two, that outside the controlled conditions of the lab, it was only possible to state the probability that an attempted view would or would not be a hit. Statistical significance is interesting science, but weapons require higher predictabilities, and no way was found within the time frame and parameters of the experiment to alter or affect the probabilities in any way. The outcome was "interesting" in the physics sense, but was fundamentally uncontrollable; and therefore, by the standards of the experiment, a failure.

This is where it's our job not simply to lump everything together and call it crap. Something odd happened at SRI: A "wild" phenomenon, being studied on the basis of a "look under every stone" philosophy, seemed to prove out real -- that is, statistically significant -- but not significant enough, and intractable to attempts to improve the odds. It's useless as a weapon or as just about anything else, but barring repeating the experiment we must accept that something odd enough to be genuinely disturbing happened to the technically sophisticated science workers and technicians who formed SRI's in-house volunteer test group.

This is just a plea to not throw out the baby with the bath. Because a far-out experiment fails doesn't mean that nothing was learned. We frequently learn more from our failures than from our successes. As Robert Heinlein said, if you don't bet, you can't win. Finding that remote viewing, though uncontrollable, may be accurate at rates slightly but consistently better than chance, suggests not necessarily funding more remote viewing experiments but looking more closely at basic physics for chinks where some tiny thing may have been misinterpreted for no other reason than "common sense". In other words, stay loose.

Re:For the love of.....

[javaman235]

There is no free market, and you should stop hoping it's going to come in and save the day for you.

Yep, the free market is just a fairy tale. Companies who fail to produce viable products go on forever.

What are you talking about?

Re:For the love of.....

[dbIII]

through the universal accusations of treason.

Treason is OK in this neck of the woods - they even gave Ollie North another decent job - but being "Unamerican" is a different story, as McCarthy showed.

There is also more to Lysenkoism than sending people you don't like away - and it is better that we don't go down to path to the nations science being controlled by crackpots.

Re:For the love of.....

[tcgroat]

I wouldn't put it quite that way. I say that the reason humans can fly in airplanes is because we quit trying to do it with feather-covered ornithopters. If you fixate on the goal of a flying machine with flapping wings, you wouldn't come up with the airplane. In other words, you extend and apply the proven science, rather than hoping some miraculous new science appears to validate the conclusion you insist upon.

Assuming the article wasn'r a work of satire, which it certainly could be!

Re:For the love of.....

[julesh]

Admittedly, in the unlikely event that they are right (yeah, right!), what would result would qualify, IMO, as a paradigm shift... it would mean that almost all of our physical theories about the way the universe works were fundamentally _wrong_. We'd have to abandon relativity and quantum theory as they would, for the first time since their development, be unable to explain observable and repeatable phenomena. This, I think qualifies as a "paradigm shift", just as the introduction of these two theories were the last two such shifts we have experienced.

Carte blanche?

[October_30th]

Air Force has paid to study

Heh. I guess that's like during the good old Cold War. If you just got some sort of an idea of how to beat the enemy, you've got a blank check.

Why is this a surprise?

[gkuz]

In a country in which a substantially larger portion of the population believes in the Virgin Birth than in evolution through natural selection, and which has just this week demonstrated that majority, why should anyone be surprised?

Well

[ShooterNeo]

While highly implausible, the whole idea of science is to discover things that one wouldn't expect. If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it. If the facts fit, then no matter how much someone might not desire to accept an explanation (whether it be for or against any phenomena), it is most likely the truth.

Re:Well

[FooAtWFU]

If soundly gathered evidence suggests psychic powers or teleportation is real, then we should investigate it.

The thing is... it doesn't.

Re:Well

[khayman80]

I agree that this is a serious waste of taxpayer money- this kind of pseudo-scientific bullshit has no place in any government organization.

However, most scientists that discuss teleportation don't talk about simultaneous teleportation. That *would* definitely be impossible due to relativity, like you mentioned.

In reality, quantum teleportation is a legitimate scientific topic (that's what I study, as a matter of fact). It's possible because the teleportation isn't instantaneous- it happens at a speed less than or equal to the speed of light. The reason it is called teleportation is that quantum effects are used to make a particle disappear from point A and reappear at point B (a suitable time later) without crossing the intervening space. Cool, huh?

This effect has already been demonstrated for photons, and limited effects have been demonstrated for single atoms. Whether or not it will ever be possible on a larger scale is a matter of debate... but it isn't a debate about relativity.

Re:Well

[halfelven]

There is good science to suggest that the conservation of energy is real. This has been tested repeatedly.
There is also good science to suggest that the theory of relativity is real, every day in particle accelerators across the world it's used to make predictions that turn out.
The combination of conservation of energy, and relativity suggests that on any largish scale, there can be no teleportation.

In the 19th century, there was "good science to suggest" that, given a strong enough rocket engine, objects can be accelerated to speeds bigger than 300000km/s. There was also "good science" that suggested that the space is flat and euclidian.

What i'm saying is, your argument boils down to "our present knowledge is perfect, thereby anything contradicting it cannot exist."

I am not saying that said teleportation project is sound and sane. I am saying that one should look at whatever paradigm he/she adheres to with caution.
Too often i see people otherwise rational that seem to imply that psychic phenomena are made impossible by the simple fact that a million newagers believe in them ("if a pothead believes in X, then X does not exist"). A million newagers may have an irrational belief, yet that does not make certain things impossible.

Again, i am not implying anything, i just don't like it when people take a transitory scientific paradigm as dogma.

Bait and Switch?

[Hallowed]

I'd say this is a fast one they are trying to pull to funnel the money to some black project....hell it could just be for the AF general staff coffee and doughnut fund!

Classified

[dmomo]

It's probably money procured for something they don't want to tell us they are using it for.

With the current administration...

[myowntrueself]

With the current, rather theocratic US administration, I'm surprised they don't try training field medics in faith healing...

Re:With the current administration...

[fyngyrz]

Now, if churches are profit-making, you would have a point.

No. I have a point anyway. A very solid one. I'll make it in some detail for you to pick at.

Look here: I pay taxes; the government builds roads. My family drives on roads and otherwise benefits from roads. So I am really pretty happy to pay for roads.

In sharp contrast, the church doesn't pay taxes. However, churchies drive on roads, the materials to build their churches are delivered on roads, etc.

Ergo - and there really is no way out of this - I, and other taxpayers, pay for the churchies to drive on and otherwise benefit from roads. There is zero way out of this. They're not paying, I am, and they get the benefit. So I'm paying for them.

The problem here - and it is a huge problem - is that I do not support the idea of giving free stuff to churches. I support the idea that if you want to give free stuff to a church, that is perfectly OK, of course. But you don't have my authority to give my stuff to a church, just because you like it.

As it turns out, since the funds are now in government hands, the government is paying for churchies to drive on roads. This is blatent religious favoritism, at the very least, and nepotism as far as the usual administration goes, because we usually have a bunch of religious yahoos running the country, who of course have no problem giving my money to a church in this fashion.

Any supposedly "non-profit" operation gets this benefit (which is what I presume you were referring to with your tax section quote - I can't quote sections, that's why I have an accountant and a lawyer, but anyway...)

The problem here is staring us right in the face. If the church or any NP receives a major benefit derived from my money that I do not and for which they do not have to share in equal cost - like roads, defense of property, lunch, etc... then I am being robbed; it may seem like Robin Hood style action to the religious folks - manna from heaven, as it were - but it is manna taken out of my little nest egg while they get a free lunch, and I don't like it.

If I have to pay to drive on roads, so should those people. It is just that simple.

This applies to everything that I pay taxes for, and the church or a supposedly NP entity does not.

These entities profit from the stuff that I paid for, because they did not invest in them. Free benefits for them, but I pay.

Just one more reason I maintain that our government is completely out of control.

Relevant section of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

Now, I read that several ways. It means that congress can't say "you can't create X religion(s)", it means congress can't say "you must adhere to X religion(s)", it means that congress can't say that "you must not adhere to X relgion(s)", it means that congress can't say "you must support X religion(s)", and it means congress can't say "you must not support X religion(s).

And there is the key: Making me pay for the X's to have free roads is making me support X religion, no matter whether I adhere to it or not, no matter if I want to support it or not. It is government sponsorship - big time - for superstion. It's not just wrong in conscience, not just wrong in principle, but it is entirely wrong constitutionally and therefore has no legitimate basis in law.

Hey, if they want to waste money...

[jd]

I'd be more than happy to conduct research into anti-gravity, photon torpedos, inertia damping systems, faster-than-light warp drives....

Just pay me a few million, and I'll do whatever research into fantasy physics that they want. I'll even throw in a few Powerpoint presentations for good measure.

If the choice is between spending billions on reserching quackery in the military, or spending the same money on bringing US education up to decent levels, I think the education would be money better spent. We might even end up with politicians who know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.

But if they're determined to throw money away on absurdity, then the least they can do is throw some of it in my direction. I think I could find better uses for it than anyone the USAF could hire from the Psychic Hotline.

Re:Hey, if they want to waste money...

[killjoe]

Think of it this way. Every million spent on quackery is one less million to spend on bombs. Of course without enough bombs we can't make the people of falujah obey allawi but that's another discussion altogether.

It's a joke

[ajs]

Has to be a joke. Read the PDF. The name of the sub-contractor is "Warp Drive" and the end of the document contains discussions of "negative energy" and all kinds of totally bogus junk that looks like it was culled from a Star Trek script.

Seriously, this is some fan-boy trying to rile up the millitary conspiracy theorists (and apparently doing quite well).

Until the DoD comes out and says, "yes, this is ours and we published it in all seriousness," please stop believing everything you read on the Internet.

Basic theory of science

[macaran]

In my humblest of opinions, it's a silly thing for any scientist to be upset about. The basic, overarching, redundent, axiom of all physical science is "all interactions of matter in the universe are deterministic."

That is to say, there is not such thing as a "spirit realm" or "magic" or any way of controling the universe without a clear cause and effect. This is a compleatly logical assumption to make. If you don't make it, science becomes a guess work filled with "maybes." It is nessiary for the scientific method.

It is not nessisarly true. For all practical purposes it seems to be true. However, ask anyone who belives in a god, or who practices magik, and they will tell you it is falce.

You can not say a study is worthless based on an axiom. For instance, I give that all Jews are gready, therefore all people trying to deny anti-seminism are wasting time, because it's true. Likewise, I give that magical mater interactions are inpossible, therefore all people studying them are wasting time, because they don't exist.

Anyway, it probibly is a waste of time; people just need a valid argument for it being a waste. :-o

Re:Spend Spend Spend!!!

[vaderhelmet]

You have to remember though, that the government _does_ tax us. Significant wasteful spending, while temporarily boosting the money of a few, will eventually be distributed into the taxes of the many. In situations like this the pros and cons need to be evaluated... Anyone thinking with their head on straight would see that wasteful science is bad science.

this is why I voted for Kerry

[SetupWeasel]

Psychic Teleportation? How about physically teleporting some modern flak jackets to Iraq. I hear we have people in danger there without them.

Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals

[aristotle-dude]

Any scientist worth anything would at least look for some evidence for or against rather than dismissing out of hand like the lot of you.

I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on ./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.

Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.

Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.

Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?

Re:Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals

[beeplet]

I don't see this as hypocrisy - I see it as holding studies of psychic phenomena to the same standards as other scientific studies, i.e., well-documented methods, peer-reviewed results, and demonstrated repeatablility.

The additional skepticism most people apply to claims of telekenesis probably comes from the fact that is an overwhelming number of counter-examples in everyday experience. Can you move objects with your mind? I can't. Therefore I am not very likely to readily believe that anyone can. This is different than saying, for example, "I can't play piano, therefore I doubt anyone can," because playing the piano is an ability which is a matter of degrees. If you can push a key, you can imagine someone playing a fugue. If you can walk, you can imagine running a marathon. But if every experience of your life confirms that you can't move objects just by thinking about it, not even a little bit, it is reasonable to hold someone who claims they can to a very high standard of proof.

Re:Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Any scientist worth anything would at least look for some evidence for or against rather than dismissing out of hand like the lot of you.

Exactly. We're being critical of the report because it recommends that the U.S. military spend millions on research on dubious ideas, with no evidence that the ideas have any merit.

I'm quite frankly tired of the hypocrisy I see on ./. On the one hand you accuse the christian right of being bigoted or closed minded while in the same breath demonstrate how close minded and bigoted you are.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There's a difference between being open minded to the possibility that you might be wrong, and wasting enormous amounts of money and effort into an idea that has already been shown countless times to be worthless, when there are millions of other, very promising ideas, that should be funded.

Want to see who you are complaining about? Look in the mirror.

Science is supposed to be a tool for discovery, not a religion like some of you make it out to be.

That's exactly right...and the way the tool works, is that you discover whether something is true or not using a repeatable experiment. Since every attempt to repeatably test psychic powers and teleportation has failed, there's clearly nothing to discover. Think of it this way: if someone really could repeatedly predict the future or teleport, don't you think more people would know about it? The fact is that everyone who has claimed to have this ability has been unwilling to demonstrate it under scientifically controlled conditions.

Someday, if someone does discover psychic or telekinetic abilities and they can reproduce them under controlled conditions, scientists will be lining up to study them and try to learn more about how it works.

Is aids research a waste of money because no cure has been found yet? Are all studies that reach a dead end a waste of money or do they provide us with valuable insight?

There's a huge difference. AIDS research isn't blind - it doesn't succeed or fail completely. AIDS research is focused on understanding how HIV works, exactly how it might be destroyed or suppressed, or how its symptoms could be treated. Even the most theoretical AIDS research starts with a very specific theory about exactly how AIDS could be cured, based on observations made in other experiments.

Re:Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals

[oGMo]

Ah... moderate or post, moderate or post... let's post:

Can you move objects with your mind? I can't. Therefore I am not very likely to readily believe that anyone can. This is different than saying, for example, "I can't play piano, therefore I doubt anyone can," because playing the piano is an ability which is a matter of degrees.

This is logically unsound. This assumes that TK is something that doesn't need training (or perhaps innate ability). This implies that it exists in a particular manner, which you then claim it does not, because you don't have it. Circular reasoning!

I'm not claiming it does exist or not, and I do agree with your first paragraph: it should be held to the same standards of repeatability as anything else. But the parent poster is who I agree with most. People are unwilling to even study something because it conflicts with their personal beliefs. This is science as a religion, not science as an academic tool.

Re:Closed minded psuedo-intellectuals

[Moofie]

OK, /., you can all come over to my house. We'll look in my mirror. All, what? Couple hundred thousand of you. Who have different opinions. And are not part of the same consciousness.

How can something with three quarters of a million minds be "closed minded"? How can something that spans every nation and (probably) every socio-economic group be "bigoted"?

Are there closed-minded people? Sure. Are there bigots? Absolutely. But the community is not the same thing as its individual members.

Missed opportunity...

[beeplet]

I can't believe that a serious report would put psychic teleportation on the same scientific grounds as quantum entanglement... Quantum physics has produced plenty of weird and wonderful phenomena, but not all strange experimental results are equally credible (or incredible). The author seems to have no sense of scientific skepticism. These two quotes jumped out at me:

"A comprehensive literature search for vm-Teleportation within the genre of spacetime metric engineering yielded no results. No one in the general relativity community has thought to apply the Einstein field equation whether there are solutions compatible with the concept of teleportation."

(Or maybe the idea simply hasn't gotten by peer-reviewed publications?)

"The conditions for fraud and sleight of hand [in the psychic teleportation experiments] were totally eliminated, and multiple independent outside witnesses (technical and military-intelligence experts) were present at all times to ensure total fidelity of the experiments."

(Sure... Isn't that what they all say?)

I guess it might be worthwhile in a very preliminary report to give all of the options equal consideration, but to suggest that they all deserve funding for further research makes the study kind of pointless. I wonder if they people who commissioned this report can actually take it seriously?

Re:Quantum Physics and the Quantum Mind

[bhny]

Penrose and his wacky quantum ideas are way outside of mainstream thinking on the brain.

his logic seems to be:
-consciousness is mysterious
-quantum physics is mysterious
-therefore consciousness involves quantum physics

about as sensible as collecting underpants

There is no such thing as chaos

[DigiShaman]

Some would say that there really is not such thing is chaos in the universe. But rather, the notion of chaos is nothing more then order beyond comprehension. That said, maybe consciousness has some form of predictable order to it and thus we really don't have free will. If this is the case, the being psychic is nothing more then a higher level of thought for the sub-conscious process more of the chaos around us.

Just a thought ;)

Re:Insulting...

[anagama]

• 
  If anything, Star Trek fans would (and should) be appalled by this.

My sentiments exactly. I'm a bit taken aback by the negative comments you got on this. I think Trek fans are probably bothered when ST deviates from a hard sci-fi stance. But, I think even when ST deviates into new-agey garbage, there is still a basis to say it isn't magic, just a technology humans don't yet understand. For example - worm hole aliens = Bajor's gods. I placate myself with Clark's "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (or something close to that) statement (gosh - hope I got attribution right as well).

The difference between ST and X-Files for example, is that ST presumes there is an explanation for things, even if it is one we don't yet know or can't understand. Fantasy (like X-Files or whatnot) - deals only with mysticism and paranoia. Star Trek hasn't always avoided that, but it sure is better than most.

The reference to ST fans is offensive to the fans, most of whom, I presume, have a soft spot for hard sci-fi - even if ST fails to be hard sci-fi all the time, that says nothing about the fans' preferences for stories rooted in non-mystical plots.

Re:Jon Ronson: The Road to Abu Ghraib

[payndz]

Nobody takes the guardian seriously anymore... and called for the assassination of the president [msn.com]

Oh please. It's not like this was a Guardian editorial. Charlie Brooker, the author of said column, is a humorist and comedian, for fuck's sake. And one who enjoys winding up the easily offended, at that. Occasionally he goes right to the edge - such as when he got an issue of PC Zone magazine pulled from the shelves of the UK's largest chains of newsagents for a comic strip called 'Cruelty Zoo' - but while his stuff is often twisted, it's still very funny.

Check out TV Go Home to see what else he does for a living.

Scientists have one major flaw

[bigberk]

(And I say this as an Electrical Engineer). Established, respected experts in a field are among the most reluctant to consider radically new ideas. Major shifts in science have occurred when some young oddball found a new way to look at an old problem, or an outsider to the field found a new link that was never considered before. Consider the significant (albeit slow) revolution in medicine that is increasingly acknowledging the mind/body connection. Placebo treatments that actually have physiological healing effects; patients that exert conscious control over the failing processes in their bodies.

Now I'm not saying that necessarily this teleportation stuff has any merit. I just want to point out that if you're quick to say "what crap" then you might have fallen into the trap that leads minds to stagnate; that is, to believe that existing human knowledge is complete.

If there's one thing we can bet on, it's that human knowledge is far from complete and we are far from understanding the true nature of things. We are naive creatures with limited understandings of things. Perhaps the military is more willing to gamble funding in new directions, because unlike academics their main goal isn't to protect their researching asses for the rest of their lives. Their goal is to develop new tools that the enemy doesn't have.