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Radin gets into double slit experiments

Steve001 said:
Side note. it's note a recognized word. But what it means is it sounds ironically legitimate, but in reality spurious and not at all legitimate.
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It's more legitimate than Radin's experiment.

(probably not what you meant)
 
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bjornart said:
Dean Radin is a well known parapsychologist pattern miner, looking for miniscule correlations in mountains of data with dubious methods, not a physicist. The double slit experiment is a well understood if one accept the counter intuitive nature of the quantum world. The involvement of consciousness in quantum interactions is a well known misunderstanding and hobbyhorse of the woo woo set.

Asking for something more specific would have been reasonable. Discussing tone would have been reasonable, but your first post went straight to assuming the dismissals arose as an uninformed knee jerk reaction and went on to curiosity and misinformation about current knowledge of physics.
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I suggest you re-read my post because I went into detail what my objections were and it would seem you read the post with your own confirmation bias. But whatever.

And find me the post before my comment that suggested the complaints were based on familiarity with Radin. I can't find it. :cool:

Daylightstar had to make it clear in a subsequent post that he was familiar with Radin and I acknowledged that clarification.
 
Someone recently told me that Dean Radin was doing legitimate science that shows all kinds of psychic phenomena exist. I decided to take a look to bask in the glory of the massively obvious methodological flaws.

Pretty much every aspect of his interpretations has nothing to do with the results, even if the results were legitimate. His quantum nonsense is whackily wrong. This much was obvious. Take this, for example:

"TESTING NONLOCAL OBSERVATION AS A SOURCE OF INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE"

He thinks that people can influence an interference pattern, by remote viewing which of two slits a photon goes through, as far as I can tell. He thinks that this solves the measurement problem and is evidence that quantum something is a source of intuitive knowledge. This is quite incoherent and stupid.

However, I could not spot any obvious flaws in method, or obvious data mining. He makes two predictions, does one series of experiments, and for one result p = .002, for the other p = .00001. It looks kind of like evidence that intentions can influence interference patterns. The other studies of his I have looked at are similar. Total gibberish in his descriptions of the implications, but no obvious flaws in method, and tiny p values.

I am not an experimental scientist. Has anyone gone through his studies in detail and found flaws that an amateur like me would miss? Does he falsify data? Anyone know?
 
MattusMaximus said:
So he's claiming that using your "mind powers" you can make the slit pattern change? Yup, sounds like crap to me.
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Just some background here for anyone who's not familiar with this particular brand of woo:

In the famous two-slit experiment, if you add a detector to one slit to determine which slit the electron passes through, then you no longer see the interference pattern, meaning that the act of observing it at the plane of the slits, forces it into a particle state and not in a probability wave. Woo-meisters have long interpreted this to mean that consciousness is what is forcing one state.

However, they're wrong. Observing the electron does force it into the particle state, but it doesn't require consciousness. A simple particle detector is enough of an observer to do the trick.
 
BenjaminTR said:
Someone recently told me that Dean Radin was doing legitimate science that shows all kinds of psychic phenomena exist. I decided to take a look to bask in the glory of the massively obvious methodological flaws.

Pretty much every aspect of his interpretations has nothing to do with the results, even if the results were legitimate. His quantum nonsense is whackily wrong. This much was obvious. Take this, for example:

"TESTING NONLOCAL OBSERVATION AS A SOURCE OF INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE"

He thinks that people can influence an interference pattern, by remote viewing which of two slits a photon goes through, as far as I can tell. He thinks that this solves the measurement problem and is evidence that quantum something is a source of intuitive knowledge. This is quite incoherent and stupid.

However, I could not spot any obvious flaws in method, or obvious data mining. He makes two predictions, does one series of experiments, and for one result p = .002, for the other p = .00001. It looks kind of like evidence that intentions can influence interference patterns. The other studies of his I have looked at are similar. Total gibberish in his descriptions of the implications, but no obvious flaws in method, and tiny p values.

I am not an experimental scientist. Has anyone gone through his studies in detail and found flaws that an amateur like me would miss? Does he falsify data? Anyone know?
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I think the appropriate skeptical response is to treat Radin's work like any other scientist's and wait for independent replication. The experiments he has published come across as interesting pilot studies, but considering they refute a century of prior work, it's most likely they are methodologically flawed.

Regarding flaw in methodology: historically the flaws have been undocumented procedural errors. Usually improper blinding that leads to unintentional selection bias when recording results.

Since this has to be observed as it actually happens and cannot be deduced from the paper itself, independent replication is necessary to distinguish between external event vs corrupted experimental protocol.
 
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What jumps out at me immediately from the abstract is that if this experiment was valid, he wouldn't need to appeal to consciousness in order for this to be a remarkable result. He's got an experiment repeated with a change of one variable, a variable which quantum mechanics predicts should play zero role in the measurement outcome. He's claiming that the experiment produces two different results. That means that one or both result is in conflict with quantum mechanics, which means that either he screwed up the experiment, or quantum mechanics is wrong. Forget for a moment what this other variable is: he's claiming he has demonstrated that quantum mechanics is wrong. That would be a remarkable observation. THAT should be the focus of his paper, not this consciousness crap which relies on interpretations that can't be proven. But it's not. In fact, no indication is even provided as to which scenario conflicts with quantum mechanics. Is quantum mechanics wrong when the person is watching, or when the person isn't watching? Or both? Why does he not seem even mildly curious?

But of course, I'm quite confident the entire experiment is crap, and this guy is a crackpot. Why do I say this? Well, from the comments, he says, "One way to reduce the decline effect (a double negative?) is to avoid exact replications by adding novel elements to the new studies. That's what I've done."

He's arguing that his results are not repeatable, and that he's designed his experiment specifically to avoid repetition.
 
CurtC said:
However, they're wrong. Observing the electron does force it into the particle state, but it doesn't require consciousness. A simple particle detector is enough of an observer to do the trick.
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That's the non-solipsistic answer. The problem is that quantum solipsism (not a standard term, but I think you can get what I mean) isn't falsifiable. You can't actually distinguish between the detector collapsing the electron wave function and the detector merely becoming entangled with the electron, with the observer collapsing both the electron AND the detector. But it's also precisely because we could never disprove it that we have no reason to believe it either.
 
Ziggurat said:
But of course, I'm quite confident the entire experiment is crap, and this guy is a crackpot. Why do I say this? Well, from the comments, he says, "One way to reduce the decline effect (a double negative?) is to avoid exact replications by adding novel elements to the new studies. That's what I've done."

He's arguing that his results are not repeatable, and that he's designed his experiment specifically to avoid repetition.
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I'm not sure he's exactly saying he's designed the experiment to be impossible to repeat, but rather saying he advises against independent replication because the effect will probably disappear.

I think that's the crackpot part: he's managing cognitive dissonance by avoiding contrary information. Scientists treat the decline effect as 'discovering reality' - he is treating it as a frustrating interference with his pet theory, to be avoided at all costs.
 
CurtC said:
In the famous two-slit experiment, if you add a detector to one slit to determine which slit the electron passes through, then you no longer see the interference pattern, meaning that the act of observing it at the plane of the slits, forces it into a particle state and not in a probability wave. Woo-meisters have long interpreted this to mean that consciousness is what is forcing one state.

However, they're wrong. Observing the electron does force it into the particle state, but it doesn't require consciousness. A simple particle detector is enough of an observer to do the trick.
Click to expand...
And the concept of an "observer" is specific for the Copenhagen interpretation. The Many Worlds Interpretation does not have "observers".
 
blutoski said:
I'm not sure he's exactly saying he's designed the experiment to be impossible to repeat
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I meant that he would avoid repeating things himself. My phrasing was ambiguous. :o

I think that's the crackpot part: he's managing cognitive dissonance by avoiding contrary information. Scientists treat the decline effect as 'discovering reality' - he is treating it as a frustrating interference with his pet theory, to be avoided at all costs.
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Yup.
 
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