The suitably science-fictionally named Professor Daryl Bem of Cornell University has had a paper accepted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which h+ claims
presents some rather compelling empirical evidence that in some cases — and with weak but highly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future. Not just predict it based on the past.
EoR isn't sure what "weak but highly statistically significant" means. That the psi powers are really tiny (but that we're certain they're really tiny)?
h+ does, however, include some interesting graphs showing, among other things, that Christians are more likely to believe in ESP than any other group.
The paper has led to some trippy postmodernist 'reality is what you make it' because quantum physics is all weird and hard to understand and lets you claim anything you want is possible style musing, also repeated at Psychology Today (and which Bem also argues for in his paper).
So if we accept that these psi phenomena are real, how then can we explain them without throwing out our entire understanding of time and physics? Well, the truth is that these effects are actually pretty consistent with modern physics' take on time and space. For example, Einstein believed that the mere act of observing something here could affect something there, a phenomenon he called "spooky action at a distance."
Personally, EoR never crosses a road, precisely because of the uncertainty of just where exactly that truck is, and whether it's about to pass him, or has already passed.
Quantum physics: it works at the quantum level, so it must work at the macro level. In which case, it would be called just physics.
io9 also report on the experiments:
For instance, in one experiment Bem gathered 100 subjects, half male and half female. Using a computerized system, they then played a game in which two curtains were displayed on the screen and the subjects had to choose which one had a picture hiding behind it. Some of these pictures were neutral in content. Others were chosen at random by the computer from a database of semi-erotic and erotic photos (hey, looks like science isn't boring after all).
The result: In cases where an erotic photo was lurking behind the curtain the subjects were able to accurately identify which curtain it was behind with 53.4 percent accuracy – not a huge statistical spike but significantly better than the 50 percent accuracy rate that could be expected by chance. The accuracy rates were not as high for non-stimulating images, which fell more or less in line with raw statistical chance. This suggests that the subjects could somehow sense the erotic stimuli that awaited them before it happened.
To get an idea of how close the differences are that are being claimed here, Experiment 5: Retroactive Habituation I (p.31) of Bem's paper notes, for example (EoR's emphasis):
Women achieved a significant hit rate on the negative pictures, 53.6%, t(62) = 2.25, p = .014, d = 0.28; but men did not, 52.4%, t(36) = 0.89, p = .19, d = 0.15. This sex difference is not statistically significant
Experiment 7 used 200 undergraduates and found (p.37):
Across all 200 sessions, the hit rate was in the predicted direction but not significantly different from chance, 49.1%, t(199) = -1.31, p = .096, d = 0.09. (I now wish I had simply continued to use subliminal exposures.) Nevertheless, stimulus seeking was again positively correlated with psi performance (lower hit rates)
Other experiments had either 150 undergraduates (in two experiments) or 100 (in the rest). Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that, like any truly random process, greater numbers approximate more closely to statistically expected outcomes, rather than psychically altered differences, which appears to be what is happening here.
EoR, meanwhile, is off to randomly click on interweb links, now that he knows they'll very likely be pr0n.
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