Hey everyone,
Hmm, some interesting things said in reply to my Princeton posting. To start, I'm glad to see a healthy dose of skeptisism; that much should be taken for granted. Of course, it's often the case (ala Mr. Randi) that "skeptisism" is taken so far as to ignore staggering scientific evidence, usually in the areas of study that aren't purely traditional or trodden. This is bad, because it too is bad science. When I first heard of the PEAR experiments, I had the same thoughts of measuring mind forces, etc...and it took a while of familiarizing myself with the research to agree that something was going on (and note that that was all...I just agree that something "anomalous" is going on). Also, it helped to keep in mind that this was research being conducted by the dean of Princeton, a person who taught along side Einstein and Feynman, and is no small-time intellectual heavy-hitter, with ability far surpassing my own. I'll add that I also read about the Uri Gellar stuff, and found that to be not very scientific, and was pretty devoid of exploratory thought and experimentation. So I had no trouble just dropping most of the circa 1970's paraspychological "research."
So now I think it's most obvious that there's something to this conscioussness/physical world thing that goes beyond the influence brought about indirectly through, say, our hands and feet.
By the way, rest assured that every concievable experiment to test this effect has been carried out in only the most stringent manner--the only acceptable way. 50/50 bell curve is pretty strait forward: let it run for 20 minutes and generate 100,000 trials, see that it comes out to the expected standard distribution, then bring someone in, tell them to shift it to more 1's or more 0's...or...to shift the curve to the left or to the right....or...etc... It's true that they don't know what they are doing, but it doesn't seem to matter, the affect is producable by them anyway. That's all they're looking at.
After 30 years of doing these tests, and publishing new material every year, they've quite humbly concluded, in terms of a usual scientific study, that there is something to this...and it can and has been reproduced at will, with odds against chance that are astronomical. And here's all the evidence. Of course...those rightfully skeptical are invited to look over the results and statistics for themselves....hundreds of people have.
As far as thought being a measurable force....well, maybe it is a physical force like magnetism or light, but I don't know of any way to start looking for it...other than, say....devising some type of experiment where you can try to see that it might exist before trying to measure it..well...just like PEAR has been doing!
Real or not, I think there's something more important than the PEAR experiments that can be instructive to all of us. That's that we don't understand everything, and science can only be in it's incipient stages in it's knowledge of some things. If something is anomalous, it deserves skeptical scientific experimentation, not "amazing Randi-like" blind debunking. Good science must be respected, but it can never be respected if a resoundly demonstrated phenomenon is just ignored out of hand.
Besides, it's amazing work. It's cool! Anyway, please respond back with whatever, though discourse on what their findings could mean would probably be the most interesting. Thanks for your consideration!
Adam