RPKP Update No.4
June 12th, 1996
This was originally sent out to members of the RPKP mailing list. If you
wish to receive future updates, please e-mail
The Project will be fairly inactive for the next week or so, for personal
reasons, so please be patient if your e-mail isn't answered immediately,
or if nothing new appears on the Website for a while. There should be
a sudden burst of activity in the last week of the month.
The most pleasing development of late, as you may have noticed already,
has been the appearance of the "HotBits" random number generating webpage,
put together by John Walker in Switzerland, and available at http://www.fourmilab.ch. Walker has been interested
in this sort of thing for some time, but was recently inspired by the appearance
of the RPKProject to make this valuable contribution to the emerging field of
online psi-research. We shall continue to use the noise-based true-random
number generator provided by Helmut Schmidt, but others WWW users who wish to create similar experiments could
easily use this radioactive-decay based generator as a source of "raw" data. Schmidt, incidentally, has just gone on holiday until late July, so if you're
planning to use one of our "mailto:" tags to send him a message, don't expect
an immediate answer.
Dick Bierman at the Anomalous Cognition Project (Amsterdam University) has
made a rather technical, though potentially very significant suggestion
regarding experiment design. This concerns the much-discussed "decision
augmentation theory" (DAT) of Edwin May, et. al. and possible ways in which the theory can be tested for in an experiment
such as ours. Essentially, DAT suggests that all apparent psychokinesis is
actually a subtle form of precognition. This is explained fairly lucidly
in our recent interview with May. Bierman suggests that
"...if you generate the retro PK set (RNG has a priori p of 0.5 for `1') in such
a way that half of the set is biased to 0.75 or so and the other half is
completely unbiased (just run the RNG again over the `0''s in the first half)
and you will let the pushbutton decide through computer time measurement
where to enter the set (first half or second half) then DAT would naturally
tend to give you biased entrypoints while PK would tend to give 0.76 and
0.51 as the a posteriori hit frequencies."
Those of you interested in these technical matters, as well as the
wider-reaching implications of the PK vs. DAT debate should pay a visit to the
prf mailing list where
many theorists, experimentalists, and others have been discussing these
matters in great depths. We are not intending to refute DAT (the data
speaks for itself), but simply to help clarify the issue through running
appropriate tests in conjunction with our experiments (this requires
a carefully structured initial design of course) - we have observed that
it is still far from clear in many parapsychologists' minds exactly what
DAT is claiming to "explain".
Finally, we'd like to thank Klaus Scharff for bringing to our attention
to "Destiny and Control in Human Systems (Chronotopology)" by
Charles Muses (1984). Although this book may ultimately turn out to be entirely
unrelated to the actual mechanism behind RPK phenomena, it
is at the very least a fascinating work of
pure speculation - and based on the small amount we've absorbed thus far
it appears to be more than this. The concept of "retro-causality" is developed
extensively, with many examples given. All we know about Muses is that he
has published extensively in the past on a variety of topics, including
articles in academic journals of mathematics and cybernetics, and that
he created/discovered something called "hypernumbers". If anyone is
familiar with Muses or his work, please get in touch, as we're very curious.
The RetroPsychoKinesis Project (http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp)
RetroPsychoKinesis Project Home