Black Box Oracle
Is there information in quantum noise?
DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream. […]
According to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the ‘eye’ of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.
It sounds like the worst sort of pseudo-scientific hoohah, and I wouldn’t even begin to pay it attention if it weren’t actually being examined by real universities, including Princeton, which hosts the Global Consciousness Project website.
For a less sensational version, see the EGG story and the FAQ, which explicitly denies any predictive value.
The best guess is we cannot use the EGG data for such practical applications. One major reason is the statistical nature of our measures. Nobody has yet come up with anything more direct, and this means that there will be, by definition, both false positives and negatives. Moreover, the effect size is so tiny that we almost always require repeated measures, or measures over a long time to detect any anomalies. To see precursors we have to look back across that time from a post facto perspective. Unique point events have little chance of being seen, at least by our current methods.
But don’t take anyone’s word for it. You can check out the data yourself, either historically or in real time.
from http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html
"We know, for example, that the appearance of an effect is partly determined by how we look for it, so that the exact specification of the method has to be established prior to its application and before we have any knowledge of the results. Among the options, we can look at the raw, second-by-second data or we can block it first into scores for minutes or hours, etc. Somewhat surprisingly, such choices are quite important, and can determine whether a given event is regarded as significant or as showing no effect at all." emphasis added.
With that , you can find anything in anything.
"Defining a global event is a bit arbitrary,"
This says it all. It's a Rorschach
Might as weell study tea leaves, or the flights of birds , or entrails of slaughtered live sacrifices. They work the same way and for the same reason. Ramdom, noosphere-controlled signals.
on the other hand, two Arthur Koestler books _The Roots of Coincidence_ and _The Challenge of Chance_ that I thought were pretty good on this topic. Not to mention RAW _Coincidance_. Arthur Koestler endowed the Arthur Koesther Chair of Parapsychology at none other that the U of Edinburgh, where your article starts...
Posted by asfdasfd on February 18 2005 00:06
I notice their "real time" data is on 10 minute delay. I guess so there is no instant karma of people reacting to a blip in the data, sort of a mob mentality. Would be fun to try; would be a valid experiment....
Posted by asdfasdf on February 18 2005 00:08