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# Telekinesis/Talk

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Assuming spooky action at a distance has to do with EPR and Bell, then the explanation given is common but wrong. The result has to do with the observation-determines-reality stuff built into quantum mechanics: an observation on one particle collapses the wave functions for both. It has nothing to do with the ability to actually exert forces on particles far away. Any page on Bell's inequality would have to deal with this...I'd edit this but I'm not sure if the telekinesis explanation relies on the mistaken notion or not.

The "explanation" is meaningless pseudo-scientific hogwash. EPR no more "explains" a possible mechanism of telekinesis than does magnetism or gravity or any other action-at-a-distance physical phenomenon. It's just a convenient hard-to-understand thing to point to to make people think you know something they don't. Aspect's experimental confirmation of Bell's inequality implies one of two things: either (1) Some measurable physical properties of entangled particles do not have objective existence until measured, or (2) entangled particles really do act upon each other from a distance at greater than the speed of light. Which one you choose to believe is "real" is a matter of personal preference. In any case, physical location--the property purportedly affected by telekinesis--is not an entanglable quantum state. --LDC

My concern is mostly just that people don't walk away misunderstanding EPR, I'm not actually that worried about telekinesis. I don't think version 2 is really all that tenable, or at least it has to have the strong caveat that particles can only communicate their state collapses to each other. No info can be sent by EPR, and I would hate to have people think that it could just because the couldn't find the knife between truth and pseudoscience.
...And actually, I'd like to call numerous studies into question, too.

It would make me happy to see some of this edited and place on the main page. I personally don't think that skepticism about telekinesis requires us to debate very much -- we can simply explain the scientific consensus and indicate exactly what LDC indicated above -- that just because some explanation uses scientific jargon that most people don't understand, doesn't mean that it is correct or even plausible.

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Last edited March 21, 2001 4:23 pm (diff)
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