Psychokinesis still not scientific?

ucclarke

i am still under the impact of revenge of the sith

and i wonder one thing so much related to those Jedi skills:

is there any formal scientific evidence about human beings being able to move/fire/destroy... things with nothing but thoughts and/or by forming energy waves or whatever with their minds? are there any scientific achievemets about using these kinds of skills?

El Hombre Invisible

You can fire synapses with nothing but thoughts. I don't even know if I spelled that right. )o:

ucclarke

ok , that much is clear

but any further, further than our own tissues and stuff??

selfAdjoint

You're really asking can they do that outside their own bodies, like those electricity-looking whip-things Lord Sidious could generate. I say there's no evidence for even the weakest form of that. There are uncontrolled and only casually observed tests that the participants claim show somebody moving a small mass by thought alone. There are also careful and controlled experiments, all of which show no such effect. Who you gonna trust?

arildno

However, by the power of thought (and some observations), we can come upon the idea of how to make a PISTOL.

For most practical purposes, a pistol is more reliable than this fireball-stuff.

El Hombre Invisible

Woulda made a great scene in SW too.

"Come Yoda, let us compare our knowledge of the force." BANG! "See that coming, you did not."

PIT2

This guy apparently can do something with his QI energy:

Conclusion:
source: http://www.scientificexploration.org...ts/v16n3a4.php
.pdf: http://www.scientificexploration.org...3_yan_etal.pdf

ucclarke

this's really cool,

i wonder if any more papers would come up from other academic resources as well

so there are scientific papers about psychokinesis, although i haven't read the whole paper yet and i haven't get to understand if it has been published in a serious magazine or a conference etc either

with all my high high hopes, i believe it's inevitable that one day similar skills will seriously develop to an extent where human beings would find it necessary to train themselves to be in control of them (no i'm not high :) just a sci-fi geek).

selfAdjoint

I took a look at the references in that Qi paper. All the ones about the Qi experiments were from China, and many were reported in non-scientific publications. The only western ones were about some substance called XY-5038, apparently a preparation of traditional Chinese medicine. Some of the references were instruction manuals for the various technical equipment. I conclude from this and from the rah-rah tone of the paper that the expreiments were not done with, shall we say, a cold eye. If I am wrong, they could easily be repeated in a more controlled environment.

Chronos

Dr. Yan Xin should apply for the JREF prize.

skeptic

UCClarke says, "i wonder if any more papers would come up from other academic resources as well".
It was always clear, in the past, what constituted an 'academic resource'. It was a hefty tome, very expensive to produce, with its contents carefully controlled by peer-review or even by a Cerberus-like famous academic (Lord Kelvin, say) who could personally veto anything too outlandish. But, nowadays, any group can produce high-quality glossy 'academic' journals at minimal cost, in order to spread its personal message. Peer-review merely means approval by like-minded people and so, if they all believe in 'little green men', there will soon be 'academic evidence' for the existence of little green men. OK, things have not quite got that bad yet, but the fact remains that there are already 'academic journals' which treat, as being real, ideas for which there is no, or insufficient, scientific evidence. For instance, there is a journal about survival after death, and one about homoeopathy. This makes it very hard for journalists. Many of them already think that Nature and Science are scientific journals (they are not, they are merely science magazines), so how can they possibly see through journals that are tailor-made to trick them?