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Science

Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments 315

cold fjord writes with some stunning news from the world of science, excerpting: "A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication." Here's a link to the academic paper.
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Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments

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  • by pinfall ( 2430412 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @08:24AM (#39388203)
    I see a flurry of dumb comments being posted on /..
  • by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @08:26AM (#39388213)

    I have foreseen that outcome....

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17, 2012 @08:46AM (#39388295)

    ESP is already proven to those using it on a daily basis. Physicists shouldn't ever ignore aspects of reality, b/c what they aim to do is to describe reality. They haven't done imaging of electromagnetic fields around brains yet (which are the antennae for our consciousnesses which are located outside our bodies beyond time and space). The brain is a sequencer unit for the sole purpose of serializing perception. There's also a relationship between subatomic particles and their respective consciousness-lets, there's a transitional state between consciousness and matter called not-yet-matter. An Electromagnetic Unit is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. It will all be proven with scientific studies one day when instruments have become even better. Physicists should use mathematics properly. Math is not a toy, it's a tool.

  • by JamesP ( 688957 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @08:55AM (#39388353)

    Funny how it's the skeptics who 'claim' they knew the results of this beforehand.

    Oh, and by the way, when you do an experiment like that, make sure you use a proper random number generator. (one that has a *tested* uniform distribution - if you're expecting a uniform distribution of course, otherwise, test for the distribution you're expecting)

  • by loufoque ( 1400831 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @09:05AM (#39388415)

    Damn. Thanks for ruining my day.

  • by NEDHead ( 1651195 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @10:11AM (#39388827)

    Actually, I believe there was a cable problem...

  • by fph il quozientatore ( 971015 ) on Saturday March 17, 2012 @10:45AM (#39389053)
    In this case, in order to get random numbers that are more random, I suggest that you generate a large number of them, say 10,000, and then take their average. </sarcasm>
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 17, 2012 @12:53PM (#39389871)

    Exactly! If there were psychic powers, it would be a world where those with average intellects would control vast fortunes, where hard work and study didn't pay off, and where people mindlessly followed trivial events while ignoring important events.

    Nothing like the real world.

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