Einstein and ESP (A useful and charming true story)
There is a long history of the posthumous use and abuse of Albert Einstein by crackpots of all stripes because Einstein talked about "god" and "mystery" and such.
Dude was a fucking scientist. What he talked about mystical-type-stuff it was well understood to be a metaphor, and somewhat ironic. He did not believe in god, as any religion describes god, or mysticism, or supernatural anything.
Bu he did have a properly open mind... a virtue that some grave-robbers seize on to mean what they think of as an open mind, which is kind of like a ditch full of whatever crap falls into it.
In the 1930s some ESP experiments were done at Duke University that seemed to prove that some people could consistently identify an amazing percentage of unseen symbols on cards by reading the mind of someone who could see the cards.
These experiments got a lot of press and telepathy was, for a brief time, considered legit by reasonable people who figured that it wouldn't be the weirdest thing science had discovered, and hey, why not?
The experimental results were fake. No surprise there. The subjects cheated. (Card guessing was a paid gig and people wanted to be invited back.) But that is not the point of the story.
Einstein read the articles and talked to people about them. He found the idea interesting, and did not dismiss it out of hand.
Until...
Until he found out that in the Duke experiments that ESP did not weaken at a distance. When he found that out he wrote off the whole thing as probable experimental error (a nice way of putting it) because even a previously unknown means of mental communication would follow the inverse square law.
Mind reading is fine as long as there is a real-world mechanism to accomplish it. Something in your head ends up in my head. It had to get there somehow.
The how can be mysterious but it cannot be mystical. Einstein had no use for the supernatural.
You say that a person can broadcast a thought, and another person can pick it up. Cool. But what is broadcast, and in what medium?
To say there is a mysterious new energy is one thing. To say there is some new thing that is not matter or energy and doesn't care about distance is something else entirely.
It's like the survival of human consciousness after destruction of the brain and body... okay, cool. Where is it stored? What does it "run on"? What is the mechanism?
That is the sort of inconvenient question a scientist would ask in order to think about something scientifically. Stored how? Stored where? Run on what?
Answers like, "Stored in the 12th dimension, which is Love," are mysticism.
A scientist would want to see that there was an effect that was REAL and then examine that effect.
And if the effect (ghosts, going to heaven, reincarnation, whatever) is REAL then it is not paranormal. It is normal. And it should be considered the way we consider things that are REAL.
So Einstein did ESP the dis-service of thinking about, as a thought experiment, as if it were REAL the way radio and light and gravity are REAL.
In fact, Einstein was such a skeptical, materialistic person that he famously rejected a lot of quantum physics erroneously because it seemed to smack of the mystical.
He was actually a TERRIBLE example of a groovy new-age thinker. He was too conservative and skeptical to accept some of the biggest discoveries of the 1920s.
= new reply since forum marked as read
