Re: testing psi

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Mon Jan 02 2006 - 20:03:36 MST


At 05:54 PM 1/2/2006 -0800, you wrote:

>Really though, I don't expect a detailed explanation, but I'd like to know
>what is the general mechanism being posited for psi. Is it time-travel to
>the past or is it information carrying quantum entanglement?

Nobody has come up with anything like a satisfactory theory. This is
probably the main cause of mainstream skepticism. All kinds of weird-shit
phenomena are routinely predicted by quantum theory, and usually found many
years later in labs, but nobody is scandalized by the weirdness because the
mathematical structures are so extremely nice and powerful. But then nobody
had a particularly good theory for why meteors fell out of the sky at a
time when many observations had been made supporting their existence. I
could blather on about Cramer transactional QT, suggested nonlinear
additions to the Schroedinger equation, nonlocal entanglement, but it would
all be handwaving. At this point, all one can do is gesture at the
evidence, and try to evaluate it -- not on the basis of prejudging how
likely it seems to be that such things can happen, but paying attention to
the details of the goddamned experiments.

Damien Broderick



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