What do you think about William Tiller's ideas?

[Philip]

http://www.tiller.org/

William Tiller is a solid state physicist who seems to believe in just about every paranormal claim and tries to explain them with some vague pseudoscientific talk about "subtle energies."

The following is exerpted from http://www.tiller.org/subtle-energies.html :

There is now a large body of experimental data in the general area of psychoenergetics associated with the directed focus of human intention. Re- mote influence experiments with healers, remote viewing experiments, investigations of psychokinetics, clairvoyance, homeopathy, and other phenomena confound the established picture of natural laws but attest to the existence of processes requiring the involvement of emotional, mental, spiritual, and other inadequately understood domains of nature.

Later in that article, he describes this experiment:

In the 1970's, I carried out a series of experiments I with a man who had the ability to so energize a camera and its film that whenever he took a picture while he was experiencing a certain feeling in his seventh cervical and fourth thoracic vertebrae, some striking anomaly would appear in the photograph. His held intention during the picture-taking process was, he said, "to reveal God's universe." My experiments used two cameras, one of them sensitized by keeping it close to the subject's body for several days. Both cameras were mounted on the same tripod and tripped with a single shutter release. Ordinary color film was used and was processed by its manufacturer, and the subject was never allowed to touch the film. Often, though not always, pictures taken with the sensitized camera showed one or more people as if they were partially transparent, or translucent, while pictures from the unsensitized camera appeared normal. It was also possible for the sensitized camera to take pictures through its lens cap.My interpretation of this phenomenon is that (1) some radiations exist in nature that can travel through materials that are opaque to visible light; (2) because of some unknown quality inherent in the subject's energy field, these radiations can be detected by the film in the sensitized camera; (3) some time is required for the camera placed in this special energy field to acquire its anomalous capability; and (4) the anomalous capacity leaks away in about an hour unless continuously pumped by the energy field of the subject.

Other articles by him can be found at http://www.tiller.org/tiller6.html and http://www.tiller.org/energyfields.html

 

[garys_2k]

What do I think about William Tiller's ideas?

Let him bring his special people, with special powers, in for testing. Until then I hear a train in the distance, and it calls out with its whistle, "woo-woo."

 

[rwald]

Is it just me, or is the experimental design he outlined not even single-blind?

 

[Ladewig]

In the 1970's, I carried out a series of experiments I with a man who had the ability to so energize a camera and its film that whenever he took a picture while he was experiencing a certain feeling in his seventh cervical and fourth thoracic vertebrae, some striking anomaly would appear in the photograph.

Wasn't Uri Geller doing the "Mysterious Photo" act in the 70's until a photography magazine tightened the controls on the experiment and then published pictures of him cheating?

 

[davefoc]

Ladewig,
when I was a kid, more than 35 years ago, I was reading thru my Uncles photography magazines and came across an article on psychic photography.

I had thought the article was about Uri Geller, but actually it was about a guy by the name of Serios.

This is a link to a article that contains a little description of the incident
http://skepdic.com/pphotog.html

Basically as I recall the incident, the Popular Photography writers had left a camera with a very wide angle lens in a room with Serios. Serios took off the lens cap and tried faking a psychic image. Unfortunately for him the wide angle lens caught him off to the side faking the image.

In researching my recollection of this incident on the web, I came across several references to Uri Geller doing the same sort of stuff a few years later (in the early 70's) and about the articles debunking his psychic photograhic capabilities. I believe Randi refers to some of this stuff in his books on Geller.

 

[Philip]

I am bumping this up because William Tiller is mentioned in the March 14 commentary.

You can take a look at Tiller's site to see the kind of wackiness that Randi is talking about.