Anomalies

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.

This book illustrates an interesting convergence of viewpoints from science, astrology and modern skepticism, all focused on the so-called “Mars effect controversy” which pitted the late Michel Gauquelin (and at times his former wife and research partner Françoise Gauquelin) against three different skeptic groups, one in Belgium, one in the U.S. and one in France. The core of the book, and the title piece, is a thorough analysis by Ertel (a professor of psychology at the University of Göttingen) of the tests of Gauquelin’s Mars effect for sports champions done by each of these three groups in the period from 1967 through 1996. Kenneth Irving supplies an understandable history and background of Gauquelin’s work (the Mars effect for sports champions is only one of several findings involving five different planets and eleven different professions) and the controversy itself. In addition to the foreword, Lippard (a prominent U.S. skeptic) also allowed the authors to include an abridged version of his extensive Mars effect chronology as further background.

Watch your grandfather clock next time there's an eclipse. It might be trying to tell you something, says Govert Schilling.

Nothing is more captivating than a total eclipse of the sun. Darkness races across the surface of the Earth. The sky turns stale blue. Temperatures drop. Dogs bark. And then, of course, there is the alien beauty of the sun's pearly white corona surrounding the black silhouette of the moon.

But there may be more to an eclipse than meets the eye. Swinging pendulums go wild as if some mysterious force were tugging on them. Sensitive gravimeters give readings that fluctuate violently. Gravity itself seems to quiver a bit. Or so say a small band of physicists who claim that these mysterious phenomena hint at a fundamental flaw in Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Needless to say, such claims have proved controversial. Celestial alignments, pendulum experiments, Einstein bashing - it all smacks of fringe science that deserves to be ignored. Surely there must be some conventional explanation.

An unexplained effect during solar eclipses casts doubt on General Relativity

“Assume nothing” is a good motto in science. Even the humble pendulum may spring a surprise on you. In 1954 Maurice Allais, a French economist who would go on to win, in 1988, the Nobel prize in his subject, decided to observe and record the movements of a pendulum over a period of 30 days. Coincidentally, one of his observations took place during a solar eclipse. When the moon passed in front of the sun, the pendulum unexpectedly started moving a bit faster than it should have done.

Since that first observation, the “Allais effect”, as it is now called, has confounded physicists. If the effect is real, it could indicate a hitherto unperceived flaw in General Relativity—the current explanation of how gravity works.

That would be a bombshell—and an ironic one, since it was observations taken during a solar eclipse (of the way that light is bent when it passes close to the sun) which established General Relativity in the first place. So attempts to duplicate Dr Allais's observation are important. However, they have had mixed success, leading sceptics to question whether there was anything to be explained. Now Chris Duif, a researcher at the Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, has reviewed the evidence. According to a paper he has just posted on arXiv.org, an online publication archive, the effect is real, unexplained, and could be linked to another anomaly involving a pair of American spacecraft.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner,what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

- Richard Feynman

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce non-random patterns. A description of the technical implementation is given under procedures.

The experimental results clearly show that a broader examination of this phenomenon is warranted. In recent work, prior to the Global Consciousness Project, an array of REG devices in Europe and the US showed non-random activity during widely shared experiences of deeply engaging events. For example, the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana, and the international Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, created shared emotions and a coherence of consciousness that appeared to be correlated with structure in the otherwise random data. In the fully developed project, a world-spanning array of labile REG detectors is connected to computers running software to collect data and send it to a central server via the Internet. This network is designed to document and display any subtle, but direct effects of our collective consciousness reacting to global events. The research hypothesis predicts the appearance of coherence and structure in the globally distributed data collected during major events that engage the world population.