Physics of the

Archit Dube 2rd yr Physical Science

PARANORMAL ???

Wiki definition : Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure. Is there any science at all in paranormal phenomenon?

Maybe yes

Interest in the paranormal took a deadly turn at the height of the cold war, during which a number of clandestine experiments on telepathy, mind control, and remote viewing were spawned. Remote viewing is "seeing" a distant location by the mind alone, by reading the minds of others.

Star Gate was the code name for a number of secret CIA sponsored studies (such as Sun Streak, Grill Flame, and Center Lane). The efforts got their start around 1970 when the CIA concluded that the Soviet Union was spending up to 60 million rubles a year on "psychotronic research.

There was concern that the Soviets might be using ESP to locate U.S. submarines and military installations, to identify spies, and to read secret papers.

Or Maybe no..

Funding for the CIA studies began in 1972.

United States spent $20 million on Star Gate, with over forty personnel, twenty-three remote viewers, and three psychics on the payroll.
By 1995, with a budget of $500,000 per year, the CIA had conducted hundreds of intelligence-gathering projects involving thousands of remote viewing sessions. In 1995, the CIA asked the American Institute for Research (AIR) to evaluate these programs. The AIR recommended that the programs be shut down. "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community," wrote David Goslin of the AIR.

So basically we dont know..

In the end the CIA concluded that Star Gate had yielded not a single instance of information that helped the agency guide intelligence operations, so it canceled the project. (Rumors persisted that the CIA used remote viewers to locate Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War)
IMPOSSIBILITIES

I. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. II. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. III. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S THREE LAWS

Force Fields

In science fiction it's deceptively simple: a thin, invisible yet impenetrable barrier able to deflect lasers and rockets alike.

USES : Military could use force fields to become invulnerable, bridges, superhighways, and roads could in theory be built by simply pressing a button, cities could be built under the oceans within the safe canopy of a force field.

Origin
Michael Faraday

Empty space, to Faraday, was not empty at all, but was filled with lines of force that could make distant objects move. One day, while moving a child's magnet over a coil of wire and he noticed that he was able to generate an electric current in the wire, without ever touching it. Faraday's "force fields," which were previously thought to be useless, idle doodlings, were real, material forces that could move objects and generate power. Faraday's force fields have been an inspiration for physicists for a century and a half. Einstein was so inspired by them that he wrote his theory of gravity in terms of force fields.

How to make force fields and what kind of force?

1.

The four forcesGravity : It is almost the opposite of the flat, thin, impenetrable barrier. Electromagnetism : Plastics and other insulators, for example, can easily penetrate a powerful electric or magnetic field. Also electromagnetism acts over large distances and cannot easily be focused onto a plane. The Maxwell's equations do not seem to admit force fields as solutions. Strong and weak nuclear forces : Because it is so bound to the properties of nuclei, it is extremely hard to manipulate. At present the only ways we have of manipulating this force are to blow subatomic particles apart in atom smashers or to detonate atomic

2.

3.

Although the force fields used in science fiction may not conform to the known laws of physics, there are still loopholes that might make the creation of such a force field possible. First, there may be a fifth force, still unseen in the laboratory. Such a force might, for example, work over a distance of only a few inches to feet, rather than over astronomical distances. (Initial attempts to measure the presence of such a fifth force, however, have yielded negative results.) Second, maybe the outer layer could be a supercharged plasma window, heated to temperatures high enough to vaporize metals. A second layer could be a curtain of high-energy laser beams , and a third layer made of a lattice made of "carbon nanotubes," tiny tubes made of individual carbon atoms that are one atom thick and that are many times stronger than steel.

However plasma windows and a layer of lasers are very typical to make, and the current record for length of carbon nanotubes is of length 15mm.

Telepathy
Wiki definition : Telepathy (from the Greek , tele meaning "distant" and , pathe meaning "affliction, experience"), is the induction of mental states from one mind to another. Or the passing of thoughts from one mind to another without physical contact or symbols.

Possibilities

A true telepath who could read minds at will could easily become the wealthiest, most powerful person on Earth, able to enter into the minds of Wall Street bankers or to blackmail and coerce his rivals. He would pose a threat to the security of governments. He could effortlessly steal a nation's most sensitive secrets.

But one of the most famous cases of telepathy did not involve a person but an animal, Clever Hans, a wonder horse that astonished European audiences in the 1890s.

Clever Hans, to the amazement of audiences, could perform complex mathematical feats of calculation. If, for example, you asked Clever Hans to divide 48 by 6, the horse would beat its hoof 8 times. Clever Hans, in fact, could divide, multiply, add fractions, spell, and even identify musical tones. Clever llans's fans declared that he was either more intelligent than many humans, or he could telepathically pick people's brains.

But Clever Hans was not the product of some clever trickery. The marvelous ability of Clever Hans to perform arithmetic even fooled his trainer. In 1904 prominent psychologist Professor C. Strumpf was brought in to analyze the horse and could find no obvious evidence of trickery or covert signaling to the horse. Three years later, however his student, psychologist Oskar Pfungst, did much more rigorous testing and finally discovered Clever Hans's secret. All he really did was observe the subtle facial expressions of his trainer. The horse would continue to beat his hoofs until his trainer's facial expression changed slightly, at which point he would stop beating.

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

There have been other "telepathic" animals in recorded history....but they to are an outcome of Clever Hans effect. In 1927, founding the Rhine Institute (now called the Rhine Research Center) Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, began the first systematic and rigorous study of psychic phenomena. Rhine's laboratory, in fact, set the standard for psychic research.

The vast majority of results showed absolutely no evidence of telepathy. But a small minority of experiments seemed to show small but remarkable correlations in the data that could not be explained by pure chance.
The problem was that these experiments often could not be duplicated by other researchers.

TELEPATHY AND STAR GATE

By 1995, with a budget of $500,000 per year, the CIA had conducted hundreds of intelligence-gathering projects involving thousands of remote viewing sessions, as mentioned earlier due to cold war.
Proponents of Star Gate boasted that over the years they had scored "eight-martini" results (conclusions that were so spectacular that you had to go out and drink eight martinis to recover). Critics, however, maintained that a huge majority of the remote viewing produced worthless, irrelevant information, wasting taxpayer dollars, and that the few "hits" they scored were vague and so general that they could be applied to any number of situations. The AIR report stated that the most impressive "successes" of Star Gate involved remote viewers who already had some knowledge of the operation they were studying, and hence might have made educated guesses that sounded reasonable.

So Star Gate was closed or so was said by US.

BRAIN SCANS
Various methods of brain scans are evolved through observation of EM waves leaking out of brain. This eventually led to the invention of the electroencephalograph (EEG). More thirst to read mind lead us to discard EEG as not much correct and instead use MRI[magnetic resonance imaging] machine. We now even have an advanced version of MRI, the fMRI[functional magnetic resonance imaging] machine.

Some believe that perhaps telepathy is mediated by a fifth force, called the "psi" force. But even advocates of parapsychology admit that they have no concrete, reproducible evidence of this psi force.

PSYCHOKINESIS
Examples of psychokinesis could include distorting or moving an object, and influencing the output of a random number generator.

Perhaps the most celebrated confrontation over psychokinesis in real life took place on the Johnny Carson show in 1975. This epic confrontation involved Uri Geller-the Israeli psychic who claimed to be able to bend spoons with the force of his mind. But when the live air show gave its own supply of spoons he was unable to bend spoons and hence his reputation lowered. Dr. Levy reporting sensational study results seeming to demonstrate that mice could telepathically alter a computer's random number generator. However later it was found that he actually manipulated the results hence was a fake.

Physical research

One of the most rigorous, but also controversial, studies on psychokinesis was done at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAB). This institute was exploring whether or not only human thoughts can affect a random event like tossing of a coin. Over a twenty-eight-year period, until the program was finally closed in 2007, engineers at PEAR conducted thousands of experiments, involving over 1.7 million trials and 340 million coin tosses. The results seemed to confirm that the effects of psychokinesis exist-but the effects are quite tiny, no more than a few parts per ten thousand, on average. And even these meager results have been disputed by other scientists who claim that the researchers had subtle, hidden biases in their data.

Noetic Science

Wiki definition : Noetic science, in the sense of the study of mind power, formed a motif of the bestselling novel The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. According the fictional Noetic science of the book, thoughts have mass (contrary to the idea that thoughts are weightless). As gravity affects all matter, thoughts do so as well.

INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCE:

The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) was co-founded in 1973 by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell and investor Paul N. Temple to encourage and conduct research on human potentials. Institute programs include "extended human capacities," "integral health and healing," and "emerging worldviews. Including topics such as spontaneous remission, meditation, consciousness, alternative healing practices ,spirituality , human potential, psychic abilities and survival of consciousness after bodily death.

So IONS claims that it has uncovered some fascinating facts about the power of thoughts and that the experiments are repeatable and hence are a valid proof of paranormal phenomenon.

Video:

Conclusion

So maybe we dont know about the forces of universe fully and there may exist a fifth force which till now has not been discovered as such.

And maybe with the governing equations of that fifth force which has some relations to human/animal thoughts well be able to make Force Fields ,Telepathy or psychokinesis possible.

Thank You All for your Patience