For 26 years, strange conversations have been taking place in a basement lab at Princeton University.

No one can hear them, but they can see their apparent effect: balls that go in certain directions on command, water fountains that seem to rise higher with a wish and drums that quicken their beat.

Yet no one hears the conversations because they occur between the minds of experimenters and the machines they will to action.

Researchers at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, or Pear, have been attempting to measure the effect of human consciousness on machines since 1979.

ESP, UFOs and reincarnation are treated with respect at the world's most bizarre scientific conference

Roger Nelson's formal credentials are in the respectable field of experimental psychology, but the project he has been working on since 1998 would make plenty of scientists cringe. Nelson heads the Global Consciousness Project, which is based on the theory that emotionally charged world events will cause blips in the output of random-number generators scattered around the globe. He and his colleagues believe they have already documented that effect in the aftermath of Princess Di's death, the 9/11 attacks and, more benignly, in the wave of international optimism that seems to settle over the world each New Year's Day. The simple electronic devices that generate the random numbers, he argues, may be picking up some sort of planetwide field of consciousness.

Nelson would have a tough time getting this stuff published in a major journal like Science or Nature. But he doesn't have to, thanks to an organization called the Society for Scientific Exploration, or S.S.E., which held its annual meeting outside Gainesville, Fla., last week.

Some people suspect that there may be a connection between quantum theory and conciousness.

Roger Penrose is a leading proponent of this theory.

He suggests that microtubules in the cells may provide this function. Some obvious questions/objections to this theory are the following:

Thermal noise in the body would prevent any entangled state to exist.

These microtubules exist in cells outside the brain. How does this correlate with them being associated with conciousness?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is investing close to a million dollars in an obscure Russian scientist's antigravity machine, although it has failed every test and would violate the most fundamental laws of nature. The Patent and Trademark Office recently issued Patent 6,362,718 for a physically impossible motionless electromagnetic generator, which is supposed to snatch free energy from a vacuum. And major power companies have sunk tens of millions of dollars into a scheme to produce energy by putting hydrogen atoms into a state below their ground state, a feat equivalent to mounting an expedition to explore the region south of the South Pole.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan

The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark
Carl Sagan
Copyright 1997